Innocent "liking" can fill your in box.

This is a sidebar to the current discussion of trustworthy content.

Learned something interesting today about those Facebook posts from groups or organizations that people like to "share." Most of them come from spammers.  For example, there is an organization called Activist.com.  You won't really find out who these people really are unless you are a hacker of some skill, but it's fairly easy to find that they have been blacklisted by several organizations.  Every time they get blacklisted they move to another server to wait until the heat dies off and the blacklisting expires.  Right now, they are working off their fourth server.

In the case of Activist.com they are creating email lists for political campaigns to target who will give money to specific issues and candidates.  They don't particularly care what side they come down on because it's all good money.

Here's how it works: Every time you see one of these FB memes that states some statistic that shows how good/bad a candidate/issue is and you "like" or comment on it it registers your information that you re willing to share on FB.  It stuffs that into a database and sells it to whoever wants to know about you and whether you are willing to support the buyer. 

Now it's not limited to political issues.  You will also see memes promoted by businesses that have nothing to do with the actual content of the memes.  What they are doing is harvesting data from you.  Local businesses will filter out all the non local data and target emails and Facebook advertising at the best possible customers. 

So every time you engage with one of these FB memes, you are "giving permission" to be added to a spam list.  Something to think about the next time you want to share something from some anonymous FB group.