Marketplace Tech

By Marketplace

Technology

What's Marketplace Tech about?

Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood helps listeners understand the business behind the technology that's rewiring our lives. From how tech is changing the nature of work to the unknowns of venture capital to the economics of outer space, this weekday show breaks ideas, telling the stories of modern life through our digital economy. Marketplace Tech is part of the Marketplace portfolio of public radio programs broadcasting nationwide, which additionally includes Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report and Marketplace Weekend. Listen every weekday on-air or online anytime at marketplace.org. From American Public Media. Twitter: @MarketplaceTech

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Now we know some of what Fa...

09.17.2021

Facebook knows a lot about how it affects its users, because it’s investigated possible negative impacts. For instance, internal research showed that one of its algorithms actually encourages angrier content. Or that Instagram, which it owns, makes body image issues ...

Marketplace Tech episodes:

09.17.2021 Now we know some of what Facebook knows about how it’s hurting us Facebook knows a lot about how it affects its users, because it’s investigated possible negative impacts. For instance, internal research showed that one of its algorithms actually encourages angrier content. Or that Instagram, which it owns, makes body image issues ...
09.16.2021 There’s still a lot to learn about buying now and paying later There’s been a surge in the buy now, pay later space, which is exactly what it sounds like: Get something you maybe can’t quite afford and pay it off in installments. You might not even need to have your credit ...
09.15.2021 Facebook is taking a run at the whole cameras-in-glasses thing You’d look so good in these Ray-Bans, and you could capture the envious stares of people who can’t believe how good you’d look. Because these glasses are built through a partnership with Facebook. They allow you to take photos and ...
09.14.2021 Big Tech is finally seeing the dollar signs seniors represent Apple’s streaming event from California happens today and many expect there’ll be an announcement of a new iPhone model. Speculation always abounds, because Apple is notoriously tight-lipped with these events. One thing that they have announced is a new feature ...
09.13.2021 Looking for worms in Apple leaves a bad taste in ethical hackers’ mouths Bug bounties. They’re an important security tool in the arsenal of many tech companies. Here’s how they work. Give ethical hackers the chance to probe your systems for weaknesses, pay them for exploits they find and fix said exploits before ...
09.10.2021 Storms are getting stronger. So how do we adapt? Friday marks the statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, which has already been a very active and destructive one. Marketplace’s Jed Kim continues his discussion with Paul Robinson about how tech can help us cope with flooding. Robinson’s executive ...
09.09.2021 Flooding is getting worse. Can tech help us deal with it? Water infrastructure — it’s boring. Invisible. We only care about it when things go wrong, and things have been going wrong. Punishing storms have caused catastrophic flooding in New York, Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere. But water systems are expensive, time ...
09.08.2021 The business of editing genes to battle disease is bringing in record funding When you’re sick, you can get treated with medicine or surgery. There’s a growing field, though, that looks at our own cells as treatment delivery systems. Many see it as the future of medicine, and that’s prompting a lot of ...
09.07.2021 El Salvador becomes the first to make bitcoin a national currency Starting today, bitcoin is an official national currency in El Salvador, along with U.S. dollars. To use the cryptocurrency, Salvadorans need to download an electronic wallet. If they use the government-sanctioned wallet, they’ll get $30 worth of bitcoin to use. ...
09.06.2021 The right to repair broken tech is key to farmers This episode originally aired July 19, 2021. The Federal Trade Commission is turning its attention to the right-to-repair movement — a pushback against manufacturers limiting who can repair the equipment they make. The agency put out a report on this ...
09.03.2021 Apple and Google’s app stores have been fortresses of commerce. South Korea fired a cannonball. When buying apps or making in-app purchases, you’re pretty much limited to either Apple or Google’s systems, and those companies are paid a commission of up to 30% on your purchase. South Korea this week passed a law that will ...
09.02.2021 Covid tested our ability to teach during a crisis. As a new school year begins, how are we doing? Schools across the country are opening their doors to students again. Many have remote options for those who need it. But a handful of states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, have largely banned remote learning, saying it’s just not effective ...
09.01.2021 OnlyFans put many of its users through an emotional wringer. Sex workers are getting fed up. Sex workers are planning to demonstrate outside of several major banks in New York City on Wednesday. They say Bank of New York Mellon and others are discriminating against them by refusing to process payments for companies like OnlyFans. That ...
08.31.2021 The mission to get girls coding doesn’t take a COVID break The gender gap in tech starts pretty early. Look at computer science students: Roughly 4 out of 5 bachelor’s degrees in that field go to men. That’s why the nonprofit Girls Who Code aims to get girls interested at a ...
08.30.2021 A kid’s dream come true — video games as medicine! It’s the age-old mantra of parents who won’t let their kids have gaming consoles — too many video games hurt your brain! But last summer, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever prescription video game. It’s called EndeavorRX, and ...
08.27.2021 The legacy of the Theranos debacle weighs especially heavy on women in biotech The trial of Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO and founder of the blood test company Theranos, is set to begin next week. Holmes is charged with wire fraud, having allegedly defrauded investors about the accuracy of Theranos’ technology. She’s pleaded not ...
08.26.2021 Admit it, you rank your friends by how much they annoy you. Now, Google’s doing it for websites. What drives you nuts about surfing online? Maybe it’s news sites that autoplay videos or cooking pages that bury their actual recipes below expanding ads. Or maybe it’s your dad, who keeps sending you links to Hampster Dance. Well, for ...
08.25.2021 Big batteries are key to the planet’s future. But what’s up with these Bolt fires? The electric vehicle market got a little shake-up this month after Chevy recalled all of its Bolts due to the risk of battery fires. The recall comes as the EV market is getting hot … uh, no. It’s set to ...
08.24.2021 Everyone finally understands the importance of cybersecurity. What does that mean for cybersecurers? There’ve been lots of big security breaches recently. Like in the recent case of T-Mobile, where about 50 million people’s personal information got exposed. And attacks on critical infrastructure, like the Colonial Pipeline hack. Remember those gas shortages along the ...
08.23.2021 Smart cities promised urban tech utopias. So where are they? Early in the pandemic, Sidewalk Labs — an offshoot of Google — announced it was shutting down a big project in Toronto called Quayside. It was meant to be a testing ground for smart-city concepts, a hyperconnected neighborhood from the ...
08.20.2021 It’s the last gasp for Internet Explorer, once the browser to rule them all This week, some Microsoft apps, like Outlook, started their slow march to no longer working in Internet Explorer. Next year, the browser itself won’t be supported anymore, as Microsoft moves users to its Edge browser instead. It’s the end of ...
08.19.2021 Digital tools have become a liability and a lifeline of last resort in Afghanistan When the Afghan government quickly fell to the Taliban over the weekend, alerts went out with instructions to delete digital activity. Contacts, photos, music — anything that might link someone to something opposed by the Taliban. But in the absence ...
08.18.2021 Using the power of minor internet celebrity to promote vaccines The Biden administration is reportedly considering recommending a booster shot of the COVID vaccine. But almost a third of Americans over 12 haven’t gotten their first dose yet. Some local health departments are pioneering a new way to reach the ...
08.17.2021 A window into the chaos and suffering in Afghanistan, through uploads A lot of disturbing images have come out of Afghanistan. Some taken by professional media, such as people flooding a runway at the airport in Kabul, and many others taken by citizens on their phones and posted to social media. ...
08.16.2021 If we’re gonna spend billions improving broadband, we kinda need to know what’s there High-speed internet, safe to say, has become pretty essential to our lives, especially during the pandemic, and yet many Americans struggle to get it. The government has mapped internet access for years, but those maps have overestimated that access. So ...
08.13.2021 Getting a clearer picture of wildfires from thousands of miles into space The Dixie fire in Northern California has spread more than 700 square miles, making it the largest single fire in California history. There are more than 5,000 firefighters working on the ground to contain it. Increasingly, technology is aiding firefighting ...
08.12.2021 A tech optimist reacts to a not-so-optimistic climate report The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, issued a report this week that laid out over nearly 4,000 pages the reality that many are already living: Climate change is here, and much of that change is irreversible — rising ...
08.11.2021 Good news, parents and guardians! Social media might be getting a little safer for kids. Google just announced a slew of new policies to make its products safer for young users. Facebook did the same just last month. Both said they will restrict targeted advertising aimed at kids and teens, though in slightly different ways. ...
08.10.2021 It’s harder to schmooze a VC over Zoom, but the money’s still flowing Venture capital investors poured more money into startups over the past year than ever before, according to financial data company PitchBook. Venture is, of course, how a lot of tech startups raise money. This finding may come as something of ...
08.09.2021 So you have to be vaccinated to get into that hot new bar? There’s an app for that. More and more places are starting to require vaccines for work, school or to get into concerts, bars and restaurants. That means we’re going to need a way to prove vaccination. There’s the paper card from the CDC everyone gets ...
08.06.2021 Why is China targeting its own internet companies? For months, the Chinese government has been putting pressure on big tech companies. It penalized the recently public ride-hailing company Didi for how it collected user data. It blocked two major video game streaming platforms from combining, hit e-commerce giant ...
08.05.2021 Is Uber turning Postmates into a zombie app? We learned this week that Uber saw strong demand for its food delivery service in recent months, despite restaurants reopening. Late last year, the company bought its competitor Postmates for $2.6 billion dollars. Behind the scenes, Uber has been working ...
08.04.2021 Twitter wants bounty hunters to help fix its image-cropping algorithm Back in May, Twitter partially disabled an algorithm that cropped photos posted by users in ways that revealed certain biases. A company audit, and plenty of people on the internet, found the algorithm preferred white faces over Black faces, and ...
08.03.2021 Do privacy “nutrition” labels stop us from eating the burger? About seven months ago, Apple rolled out some new features that let users see exactly how apps collect data about us and share it with advertisers. The privacy “nutrition” labels run pretty much on the honor system: It’s up to ...
08.02.2021 An app to track home health care aides has unintended effects They’re called electronic visit verification apps, or EVVs. They log the hours and the movements of home health care workers paid for by Medicaid. States are just starting to roll them out as part of an Obama-era program that promised ...
07.30.2021 The Activision Blizzard walkout could bring a reckoning for the video game industry On Wednesday, hundreds of employees of video game company Activision Blizzard walked out. The protest followed a lawsuit from California regulators accusing the maker of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty of unfair pay and lack of advancement for ...
07.29.2021 When it comes to electric car charging, it’s all about location, location, location Yesterday, the show focused on how the growing market for electric vehicles is affecting the supply chain for batteries. Today, how about where to charge all those batteries? Many people have electric cars, and a lot more will by 2025. ...
07.28.2021 The road to an electric vehicle future is paved with lithium The electric vehicle market, while still small, has grown rapidly this year. Of course, a global shortage of microchips could slow things down. In the long term, there’s also the issue of availability of lithium, a soft, silvery metal that’s ...
07.27.2021 Why it’s so hard for biographies about women to stay on Wikipedia When you search for someone notable on the internet, one of the first things that often pops up is a link to their Wikipedia page. But if you’re looking for a notable woman, that might not be the case. There ...
07.26.2021 How technology is changing what happens after you flush Let’s talk about gardening technology. Not some fancy gadget for monitoring water or sunlight, but technology that feeds the dirt itself. Washington, D.C.’s wastewater-treatment plant is one of the largest high-tech plants in the world. It uses a process akin ...
07.23.2021 How important is broadband to the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan? Optimists in Washington, including President Biden, are hoping debate on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package could start as early as Monday, just before the August recess. Senate Republicans blocked a procedural vote to start that debate this week, pushing for ...
07.22.2021 Augmented reality may change how we see the world. Until then, we have Pokémon. It’s been five years since Pokémon Go launched, sending kids and adults alike out into the streets, capturing Pokémon through their smartphones. It was one of the first massively successful augmented reality games, generating maps populated with the fantastical creatures ...
07.21.2021 Robots are making progress on space exploration, along with billionaires High profile trips by billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have more people thinking about the future of space tourism. There’s a long way to go before that’s common, but one destination for would-be space explorers is Mars. NASA scientists ...
07.20.2021 New evidence that your smartphone isn’t nearly as private as you hope Seventeen international news organizations dropped the results of a sprawling and detailed investigation over the weekend. It’s called the Pegasus Project, and it found that Israeli surveillance tech firm NSO sold its software to clients who used it to spy ...
07.19.2021 The right to repair broken tech is key to farmers The Federal Trade Commission is turning its attention to the right-to-repair movement — a pushback against manufacturers limiting who can repair the equipment they make. The agency put out a report on this in May that found “the burden of ...
07.16.2021 In the face of mass protests, the Cuban government turned off the internet This week in Cuba, journalists, influencers and regular citizens posted scenes online from the country’s largest anti-government protests in decades. That is, until the government restricted access to a number of social media platforms. According to the internet monitoring firm ...
07.15.2021 The EU has led the charge on regulating Big Tech. What about disinformation? Arguably one of the biggest problems facing the world right now is disinformation. It’s fueled everything from the spread of QAnon conspiracy theories to the Capitol Insurrection to anti-vaccination movements — all of which undermine democracy and public health. Lawmakers ...
07.14.2021 Europe shows a new way to think about regulating tech companies The European Union has led the charge on regulating Big Tech companies for years now. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation was the first major rule on the transfer and tracking of personal data. The EU has also given the rest ...
07.13.2021 Big Tech dodged one tax bullet, but another one is coming European Union leaders said Monday they will delay, for now, plans for a digital tax that would require Big Tech companies like Facebook and Google to pay taxes anywhere they do business. That’s because, this weekend, leaders from the world’s ...
07.12.2021 What does it take to get people to be kind online? The neighborhood social media platform Nextdoor is planning to go public at a valuation of around $4.3 billion. The company says it saw astronomical growth in active users this past year. Its shares will trade under the ticker symbol “KIND” ...

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