Author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has quit Facebook, but for a reason that goes beyond the usual concern with Facebook’s privacy problems. He says: “Through a new variation of the Sponsored Stories feature called Related Posts, users who ‘like’ something can be unwittingly associated with pretty much anything an advertiser pays for. Like email spam with a spoofed identity, the Related Post shows up in a newsfeed right under the user’s name and picture. If you like me, you can be shown implicitly recommending me or something I like — something you’ve never heard of — to others without your consent.” We find that exceedingly troubling, since it means that you lose even more control over your online persona on Facebook.

Joe Kissell joined Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, and Rene Ritchie on MacBreak Weekly to discuss password security (particularly in light of the recent Evernote security breach), iCloud email filtering, and a variety of other topics.

We’re having huge discussions internally about just how secure we should make our digital lives, and this recent blog post by security expert Jeremiah Grossman brings a wonderful level of reality to the table. Jeremiah takes extreme security precautions, thanks to his position in the security industry, and this post is the tale of how he forgot a key password and the astonishing lengths he went to in order to get it back.

Twitter reset the passwords for 250,000 users last week after it became aware of numerous unauthorized access attempts. According to Twitter’s Director of Information Security Bob Lord “…attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords” for a quarter of a million accounts. Although it would be inconvenient to have someone else posting to your account, the greater danger is to people who reuse passwords among other services. As always, we recommend creating strong passwords, preferably using tools such as 1Password or LastPass.