Marketplace Tech

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled that the way thousands of companies share personal data between the U.S. and Europe. They use something called “Privacy Shield,” which isn’t an app. It’s a set of legal rules to moving information back and forth. But the court ruled that doesn’t do enough to protect European’s data from the U.S. government. I spoke with Adam Satariano, a European technology correspondent at The New York Times. He says it’s hard to tell exactly what happens next.

Google made a new push for more defense work this week, with an approach to cloud computing it thinks should appeal to government customers. Until now, Google has mostly sat those lucrative contracts out, in part because it’s faced pushback from some employees. Other tech companies have, too. But new reporting shows Big Tech is doing a lot more defense and law enforcement work than perhaps was realized. I spoke with Jack Poulson, a former senior research scientist at Google. He now runs the nonprofit Tech Inquiry and has reported on the thousands of subcontracts tech companies have with defense contractors.

If you were hoping to get shopping delivered via Shipt today, you may be out of luck. Shipt, which is owned by Target, pays gig economy workers to deliver goods from brick-and-mortar stores to consumers’ homes around the country. Those workers aren’t staff, so they don’t get a salary or hourly wage. They’re paid by the job. Shipt is now planning to expand its use of an algorithm to determine how much they get paid. It’ll take into account a lot of factors, like how busy a store is and how bad traffic is. But the calculation is opaque, and workers would like more transparency. They’re boycotting the app today. Jack Stewart speaks with Marketplace’s workplace culture reporter, Meghan McCarty Carino.

Maybe you’re one of the more than 10 million people who’ve set up an account on Robinhood, the highest-profile example of apps that say they’re increasing access to the stock market by making trades free. Critics say they’re “gamifying” trading, with psychological nudges and push notifications that encourage frequent, and potentially risky, trades. There are few controls or limits for users who may be inexperienced. Jack Stewart speaks with Vicki Bogan, founder of Cornell University’s Institute for Behavioral and Household Finance.

In the before times, starting a restaurant was a big investment — location, tables, chairs, utensils, branding, marketing and hiring employees. Now, with predictions that 25% of small restaurants could close because of the pandemic, entrepreneurs are finding that all you really need is a kitchen, an online menu and a way to deliver food. Which is usually through a delivery app. Uber’s plan to buy Postmates for more than $2.5 billion is in part a bet on food delivery in at least the near pandemic future. Molly speaks with Anna Wiener, a contributing writer for the New Yorker covering Silicon Valley. She wrote about all this in a piece called “Our Ghost-Kitchen Future.”

Civil rights experts say Facebook doesn’t enforce its policies against hate speech consistently. Facebook has said it’s difficult, if not impossible, to actually moderate content on a platform as big as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp combined. Molly Wood speaks with Spandi Singh, a policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute.

In facial recognition and AI development, computers are trained on massive sets of data, millions of pictures gathered from all over the web. There are only a few publicly available datasets, and a lot of organizations use them. And they are problematic. Molly speaks with Vinay Prabhu, chief scientist at UnifyID. He and Abeba Birhane at University College Dublin recently studied these academic datasets. Most of the pictures are gathered without consent, people can be identified in them and there are racist and pornographic images and text. Ultimately, the researchers said, maybe it’s not the data that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the whole field.

For years, the venture capital industry has been pressured to be more diverse and inclusive — invest in and hire more women and people of color. In the past month, Molly Wood has talked with Black startup founders and investors about what it takes to drive real change in tech, and they say it’ll take work from big Silicon Valley firms and the big institutions that invest in those firms. She asked Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, what Kleiner is doing to improve representation at Silicon Valley.

Marketplace has been looking at how, in the middle of this pandemic, the internet is everything. Access and cost are problems for many, but what about data? Many broadband providers limit how much data subscribers can use each month; go over, and there are extra fees. Some lifted these caps at the start of the pandemic, but now those are coming back. Molly Wood spoke with Tom Merritt, host of the “Daily Tech News Show” podcast.

From hate speech to privacy, to labor and biased algorithms, society is reckoning with the power of technology and how it affects our lives. Molly Wood speaks with Emanuel Moss, a researcher at the nonprofit Data & Society and author of an upcoming report called “Ethics Owners.” It argues that data-driven tech companies should be creating specific positions for people whose entire job is to think about policies and product development with ethics in mind. Basically, a person who is hired to imagine the worst possible usage of a product.