Marketplace Tech

This month in California, voters approved Proposition 22, a ballot measure that says drivers for apps like Uber, Lyft and Instacart will remain independent contractors, not employees. We hear from four gig drivers both in and out of California who have mixed views on the law.

As the pandemic recession drags on, people are turning to gig work to fill the gaps, and the nature of that work is evolving. Proposition 22 in California, which passed last week, lets companies classify delivery and ride-hail drivers as independent contractors. There are some new requirements, such as a wage floor and some health benefit options. Some describe it as a “third way” between benefit-free part-time work and traditional full-time employment. If the idea catches on more broadly, what could it mean for how we work? Molly Wood speaks with David Weil, dean at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He says the idea comes from Canadian labor law.

In this pandemic, we are shopping online way, way more than we ever have. And sometimes we want to return the things we buy, which can be a hassle — with shipping and restocking fees and printing out return labels with printers we may or may not have at home. This holiday season, some retailers are trying to make returns easier. For example, employees at Simon malls will process returns for brands like Levi’s and Gap, so all you have to do is go to a mall kiosk with your item and a QR code. But as annoying as online returns can be for us, they might be worse for the retailers. Marielle Segarra speaks with Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.

Shopping is a big part of the holiday season: We go downtown or to a packed mall, browse the store windows, smell the chestnuts roasting in the street. The pandemic has obviously changed all this, but some retailers like Gap, Ted Baker, and Ralph Lauren are trying to deliver that experience through our computers. Marielle Segarra recently clicked through a virtual tour of Ralph Lauren’s Beverly Hills store and talked about the virtual storefront experience with Joe Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “The Aisles Have Eyes.”

We’ve been waiting for 5G, the fifth generation of wireless technology, for years. And the promise of it is great: that it’ll eventually be 100 times faster than 4G and make technologies, like driverless cars and augmented reality, more sophisticated. But there’s still a lot the incoming Biden administration and telecommunication companies will have to do before we have the 5G we’ve been promised. Marielle Segarra speaks with Doug Brake, director of broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He says there are several different kinds of 5G, and we’re pretty far off from having the fastest kind from coast to coast.

The social media site Parler doesn’t fact-check, doesn’t moderate and doesn’t label or remove misinformation. Conservatives and far-right conservatives love it, and disinformation researchers are worried. But there is one other interesting element to Parler: There’s no algorithm that amplifies stories, like the kind that tends to make disinformation go viral on YouTube or Facebook. So, could that lessen its impact? Molly speaks with Shannon McGregor, a professor studying social media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about new Twitter features, mostly disappearing tweets. But Twitter also announced Tuesday that it’s planning voice-only chat rooms called Spaces where you talk instead of type. Earlier this summer, Twitter experimented with letting people send audio-only tweets, but didn’t allow for captioning those tweets, so they were inaccessible to the deaf community. Twitter put that feature on pause and has now created two new teams — one to make Twitter a more accessible place to work and another to vet product ideas for accessibility. And, according to Twitter, accessibility has been “top of mind when developing Spaces.” “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood speaks with Dalana Brand, vice president and head of inclusion and diversity at Twitter.

One thing the Biden administration will inherit when it comes into office is a trade and a tech war with China. President Donald Trump put all kinds of restrictions on American companies doing business with China on the use of technology from Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei, bans on Chinese smartphone sales here and, of course, an executive order banning TikTok and WeChat, which is still in court. The moves were ostensibly about national security, but also an effort to keep China from developing the next generation of technology faster than the U.S. Molly speaks with Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the nonprofit New America and a research scholar at Yale. She asked her what U.S.-China tech relations are like right now.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, was created two years ago within the Department of Homeland Security to shield America’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Last week, CISA’s assistant director was pushed out, and there have been reports that its director expects to be fired. So what does this all mean for that critical infrastructure? Molly speaks with Kim Zetter, a cybersecurity journalist and author.

The pandemic has forced lawmakers around the world to get creative about passing legislation. But in the U.S., members of Congress still have to show up to vote in person or have another member cast a proxy vote on their behalf. A report out last week by the House Administration Committee says Congress could conduct remote voting if it wanted to securely with existing technology. Amy Scott speaks with Beth Simone Noveck, who studies the impact of technology on governing as a professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. She says remote voting is already happening in other countries and in several U.S. states via app or roll call by phone.