Marketplace Tech

Earlier in this pandemic, Apple and Google joined forces to help create a shared underlying technology for digital contact tracing apps. But at least in the United States, they haven’t caught on. Apple and Google’s tech only work with apps developed by government health authorities. And almost no states have developed those apps. Marketplace’s Jack Stewart speaks with Ina Fried, chief technology correspondent for Axios.

There’s a national conversation going on about race and inequality, and that includes at work. A lot of companies are holding internal listening sessions to start to address systemic racism. And because of the pandemic, many of those tough conversations are happening via videoconference. For some, it may be easier to have tough conversations from the comfort of their own home. Marketplace’s Jack Stewart speaks with Kira Banks, a professor of psychology at Saint Louis University, where she runs the Race and Intergroup Dynamics Laboratory.

Amazon, along with other online retailers, has seen a massive increase in demand in the past few months. The company has also faced accusations about its working conditions being unsafe, especially during this pandemic. The coronavirus has accelerated the push to automate warehouses, but the technology isn’t quite there yet to improve conditions for human workers. Marketplace’s Jack Stewart speaks with Ken Goldberg, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Our computers and cellphones are an increasingly huge part of how we work, socialize and even organize protests. In a natural disaster, those communication tools become even more important but often less reliable. That’s particularly an issue for first responders, who are soon going to have to start dealing with this year’s inevitable hurricanes and wildfires. Marketplace’s Jack Stewart speaks with Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator who now consults for goTenna, one of the companies working on “mesh network” technology.

Hacktivism, or computer hacking as activism, is in the news again with the group Anonymous claiming responsibility for a cyberattack on the Minneapolis Police Department this month. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood interviews M.R. Sauter, assistant professor at the University of Maryland and author of “The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet,” for a dive into the history and tactics of so-called hacktivists.

After largely ignoring demands from civil rights groups, tech giants IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have put moratoriums on sales of facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies as protests against police brutality continue.

Big tech companies and investors have a bad track record when it comes to hiring, investing in and retaining people of color. Especially Black employees. Host Molly Wood speaks with Tiffani Ashley Bell, an alum of the Y Combinator startup accelerator and founding director of the water nonprofit the Human Utility. She wrote the Medium post “It’s Time We Dealt With White Supremacy in Tech” and originated the phrase “Make the hire. Send the wire.”

Pressure is growing on social media platforms to intervene more against misinformation, hate speech and other content. A new report says a big barrier, especially at Facebook, is that content moderators are mostly outside contractors and there aren’t nearly enough of them. Host Molly Wood speaks with Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, who wrote the report. 

While people around the country deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and protest for police reform and racial justice, the climate is continuing to change. The U.S. just experienced the warmest May on record. A U.N. report last week warned that mass extinctions are happening far faster than expected. While climate change solutions are on the back burner for now, they’re as urgent as ever. Host Molly Wood speaks with Seth Bannon, a founding partner at the venture firm Fifty Years.

As protests over police brutality and systemic racism continue, social media is a tool for organizing, amplifying and arguing. Yes, it can often be a racist dumpster fire. But, experts say that a big, messy public square might actually be the best place to create political change. Host Molly Wood speaks with Omar Wasow, who is a founder of the social media site BlackPlanet, an early place for online Black expression. He’s now a professor at Princeton studying race and protest.