The nature of social media trends must be cyclical. That’s the best explanation I can come up for why the stupid game invites and the “personality quiz” reports have started flooding my newsfeed again. I enjoyed the brief period of time when my social media feed was devoid of the aforementioned invitations.

Most people are blissfully unaware of the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content generation. A huge chunk of the Internet is generated through outsourced writers who are trained to beat search engine criteria and make the content they publish appear on the front page of search results.

SEO involves carefully controlling aspects of the articles such as keyword density in order to make search engines believe the article is relevant. What this results in is a whole lot of articles written by people who have no authority on the subject they’re writing about.

In addition, content generating software can literally “remix” a sample article by substituting synonyms in various permutations and combinations and can dole out hundreds of seemingly unique articles from a single parent article.

So, why content generation? Most of it is for advertising. Yahoo does not care about giving you details on Kim Kardashian’s latest trip to the grocery store. It’s all ad-driven. Being exposed to SEO gives you a good eye for spotting valid content on the Internet.

When I saw people taking a billion personality quizzes on Facebook, it set off an obvious alarm in my head. There is no way some person put in the effort to come up with a brilliant algorithm to deduce someone’s middle name just through a quiz containing 10 questions for free. My skepticism was soaring through the roof.

Needless to say, I took the quiz.

The first two questions were about my gender and age. I guess that makes sense. Certain middle names gravitate to certain genders. Names can go out of fashion and a person’s age indicates what the popular names during that year were.

Following that, every question was clearly a marketing question. Where do you shop? What are your eating habits? Have you had unprotected sex in the last week? What are the first nine digits of your social security number?

The sneaky rascals had turned a survey most people would religiously avoid into a fun little “quiz” to trick the average Joe. And, I may have embellished the questions a little bit. Who doesn’t?

My point is this: If you care about personal information, you need to be cautious about your online habits more.

Check your sources, and be careful where you divulge information.