Yesterday, during a Senate commerce committee meeting about data brokers—which make $156 billion tracking and selling your personal information—Senator Jay Rockefeller released the damning results of a year-long investigation. "I think it's a dark underside of American life, in which people make a lot of money and cause people to suffer even more."

Path is not a popular app. Outside of privacy crusaders and various geek niches, it's virtually unknown—a sanctimonious social network built to appeal to Facebook's haters, that ended up appealing to few. But for some reason, it's spiking in popularity around the world. Inexplicable, right? No—just shady spam tactics and money at work.