What if receiving a medical diagnosis was as simple as shopping online? The growing home diagnostics industry says it can be. At-home testing was widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic, but more health tech companies also offer DIY kits that test for food allergies, fertility and thyroid function, among other things. Some medical experts are wary of this on-demand model, but health tech investors say it can make health care more accessible. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Chrissy Farr, author of the Second Opinion newsletter, and Anarghya Vardhana, a partner at the Maveron venture firm, about the prospects of the industry and how it affects relationships between patients and doctors.

On Friday, a Boeing Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station to return to Earth without its crew. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore stayed behind due to uncertainty about the safety of the Boeing craft. The duo will instead hitch a ride back on a SpaceX mission set to arrive at the ISS in February. It’s another win for the Elon Musk-owned company, which has come to dominate rocket launches in the U.S. But NASA’s reliance on SpaceX now is a bit of a reversal, according to Steven Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict and Governance program.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for our weekly review of some of the big stories making headlines in tech. First: No, you’re not having déjà vu all over again. Google really is back in court this week for its second antitrust trial of the year. Plus, a startup in Silicon Valley wants to make AI data centers more sustainable by putting them underwater in the San Francisco Bay, but regulators have questions. And Taylor Swift announced she is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. She took to Instagram on Tuesday night to publish her stance, citing artificial intelligence-enabled misinformation as a driving force. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, for his take on this week’s tech news.

It’s an interesting time for many in the U.S. Some people feel great about President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, while others don’t. This week, people from both sides are sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner. And while it’s one thing to ignore a family member’s social media posts or online rants, that can be a bit more challenging face-to-face, sometimes leading to awkward conversations about beliefs, truth and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. And the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is also the owner of X, does have a record of wringing efficiencies out of his businesses. But the move raises many questions, like should someone whose companies benefit from federal dollars have a hand in making budget decisions? SpaceX alone has secured about $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the last decade, helping it become the dominant player in the industry. So, how has SpaceX rocketed ahead of the competition, and can anyone catch up? Ashlee Vance, the author of “When the Heavens Went on Sale” and a writer for Bloomberg, pointed to reusable rockets, an innovation that was on spectacular display when SpaceX tested its Starship system last month.

It’s Election Day and even though the campaign may be over, the battle over misinformation is not. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, about some of the misleading online narratives voters should expect to see and how to deal with them. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

We know from various studies that young people are, unsurprisingly, using generative AI tools like chatbots and image generators, sometimes for homework, sometimes for fun and sometimes for malicious purposes. A recent survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that artificial intelligence is being used among high school students to create nonconsensual, illicit imagery — in other words, sexually explicit deepfakes. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at CDT, to learn more.

Online misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and about the relief response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have surged in recent weeks, including false narratives of aid being withheld from victims for their political beliefs and aid being stolen by undocumented immigrants. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ethan Porter, professor of media, public affairs and political science at George Washington University, about why there’s been so much misinformation about these natural disasters and FEMA’s relief response.

There’s been a lot of discussion about health insurance over the last week. And one practice could be seeing more oversight: the use of artificial intelligence in coverage decisions. Plus, the FDA issues final guidance for makers of AI-enabled medical devices so they can now update their software after approval. And it was a good year for health tech startups — after a not-so-good year in 2023 — especially for those with the letters “AI” attached to their business. Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

This week, we’re talking about how teenagers are using artificial intelligence tools like chatbots and image generators, often without the knowledge of their parents and teachers, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media. Monday we heard about that research from Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of the group. And now we want to home in on a specific piece of what he said: “If you look back at the advent of social media, about 20 years ago, we pretty much blew the regulatory side of that, but also the educating teachers and parents part of that. And we left kids on their own.” So we called up Nathan Sanders, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, who has written about the overlapping risks of AI and social media.

As soon as ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, it became clear that artificial intelligence was going to send massive shockwaves through education. And, as with any new technology, young people were likely to adopt it more quickly. Well, now we have some data about that phenomenon. A new report from the non-profit Common Sense Media shows seven in 10 teenagers from ages 13-18 are using generative AI in some way. And Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino it’s not all about cheating.

There’s been quite a firehose of news this week, but we’re going to distill some of it into a nice, tall glass for you on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll dig into why some crypto insiders are upset with President Donald Trump over his preinaugural meme coins. Plus, the latest in the TikTok ban rollback and how Congress might respond. But first, amid the flurry of executive orders the president signed during his first week in office, he announced the Stargate project, a private, multiparty venture to build domestic artificial intelligence data centers. In attendance at the White House were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The investment could be as much as $500 billion. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the tech sector in recent years — the feeling that so many of the advances in internet connectivity, social media and now artificial intelligence might have caused more harm than good, increasing the need for at least caution in the industry and even, possibly, government intervention. But lately a backlash to the backlash has been brewing among techno-optimists. Their movement is called effective accelerationism, a play on the effective altruism community, and its supporters argue that unrestricted technological progress is a force for positive change. It’s received more attention since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nadia Asparouhova, a writer and researcher who’s been following the rise of the effective accelerationist subculture, often shortened to e/acc.

California relies on a variety of tools to stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low-tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on the flames. But on the higher-tech side is a new, AI-powered monitoring system called ALERTCalifornia, which was developed at the University of California, San Diego. It’s designed to speedily detect and report wildfires using a network of over 1,000 cameras and sensors. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across the state during the 2023 fire season, sometimes with impressive quickness. But the system wasn’t quick enough to prevent the current disaster in Los Angeles. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes, who explored how the fury of the Palisades fire overwhelmed that human-made system.

As fires burn in Los Angeles, many people are going online to find ways to support people who have been temporarily or permanently displaced by the disaster. But like we’ve seen in the aftermath of recent hurricanes and floods, bad actors are spreading misinformation and financial scams. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm McAfee, to learn more.

Congress considered 158 bills that mention artificial intelligence over the past two years, according to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice. But zero comprehensive AI laws have been passed. There has been movement by states, however. In Tennessee, for example, the ELVIS Act, which protects voices and likenesses from unauthorized use by AI, became law in March. In Colorado, a law that takes effect in 2026 requires developers of high-risk AI systems to protect consumers from algorithm-based discrimination. But some who fund AI technology say a federal law is needed. That includes Matt Perault, head of AI policy at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders is one calling for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America. The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include “space-based interceptors” that could potentially act as both sensors and weapons. It reminded retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff of a Ronald Reagan-era program he worked on: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known popularly, and especially to its critics, as “Star Wars.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Latiff about whether the U.S. has the technology, money and time to make this grand project work.

The president-elect is also a former president who’s been a fixture in national politics for the last decade. But predicting what Donald Trump might have in mind for the tech industry in his second term based on that history, well, that’s a tough call. Trump has, at times, had strong words for some tech titans, cozied up to others, and pushed for — and then against — a TikTok ban. His first administration initiated several antitrust cases against tech companies, but Trump recently expressed skepticism about the potential breakup of Google after a federal judge ruled that its search business was a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, a senior writer at Wired, about the future of tech antitrust policy and more in the second Trump term.

Everyone was obsessed with the new white whale of the AI world this week. We’ll get into it on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Trump floats tariffs on semiconductors from overseas. And a bipartisan Senate bill to ban kids from social media is getting another look. But first, back to that DeepSeek drama. The Chinese AI company took the world and the markets by storm with claims that its class-leading large language model was built at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals. DeepSeek claims it spent only $6 million on compute power — at least 16 times less than leading U.S. companies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.

Amid all the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office came a promise to “restore freedom of speech” and end federal censorship. Keen observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution. But the order seems to have something more specific in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech under the guise of combatting misinformation.” Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the order is a signal of the president’s continued focus on content moderation online.

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll explore OpenAI’s inroads in higher education. Plus, how passengers can get on a waitlist to hail a driverless car in Austin, Texas. But first, a look at how Google is changing its approach to artificial intelligence. In 2018, the company published its “AI principles,” guidelines for how it believed AI should be built and used. Google originally included language that said it would not design or deploy AI to be used in weapons or surveillance. That language has now gone away. Google didn’t respond to our request for comment, but it did say in a blog post this week that companies and governments should work together to create AI that, among other things, supports national security. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about these topics for this week’s “Tech Bytes.”

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has long been the holy grail of innovation — a synthetic intelligence with all the capabilities of a human mind or more. Recent advances in AI have many predicting we could be closer to achieving it than we’re ready for. It’s a reality that preoccupied the late diplomat Henry Kissinger before he died last year at 100 years old. He collaborated with Eric Schmidt, formerly at Google, and Craig Mundie, formerly at Microsoft, on the new book “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.” Mundie joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss what a future with superintelligence might look like.

The cryptocurrency industry has been fairly quiet recently, with the scandals around the bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX and its former chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, fading from the headlines. But behind the scenes, the industry has become a bit of a power player in the 2024 elections — funding political ads, endorsing House and Senate candidates and raising millions of dollars, according to a recent report from the nonprofit group Public Citizen. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to learn more.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration. The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions, like, is it a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? What the heck is a meme coin anyway?Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers.

There’s no shortage of bullish voices on artificial intelligence among the titans of tech. But even many of the leading evangelists, in addition to prevailing pop culture narratives, tend to strike a note of impending doom when envisioning the future of the technology. Reid Hoffman wants us to consider the alternative. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn, and a founding investor and former board member of OpenAI before he branched into other ventures, like Inflection AI. And his new book “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future?” explores those alternatives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoffman about what he means by the idea of “superagency.”

Last week’s annual gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a bit overshadowed by the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. The president made a virtual appearance at the conference, delivering a speech that hit on several of his recurring themes: tariffs, inflation and artificial intelligence. AI has been a big topic at the summit for several years. But the way it was treated this year felt different, according to Reed Albergotti, tech editor at news website Semafor. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino caught up with Albergotti just as he was wrapping up his reporting at Davos.

Getting fast, comprehensive and accurate information is crucial during emergencies like the devastating wildfires still raging in the Los Angeles area. And over the last two terrifying weeks, one app has become the place to find it: Watch Duty. Operated by a nonprofit, the app was launched in 2021 to track wildfires in Northern California and now provides coverage for more than 20 states. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with David Merritt, Watch Duty’s chief technology officer, about how it all came together.

It’s Inauguration Day, and a veritable who’s who of tech are in attendance for the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. The massive presence of tech leaders, overtly supporting or just making nice with Trump, represents a stunning reversal from his first term. Today, we’re looking back at what happened in between. President Joe Biden was often seen as taking an adversarial approach to the tech industry.

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes,” we’ll dive into President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence plus a request Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to President-elect Donald Trump. But first, tech news site The Information reported that TikTok plans to completely shut down its app in the U.S. on Sunday and will instead direct users to a website where they can read about the platform’s ban. According to that reporting, TikTok will allow American users to download their data — and, if the ban is overturned down the road, those users will be granted access to it immediately. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

Since large language model chatbots hit the scene a few years ago, there’s been a lot of speculation about which jobs they might disrupt most. A lot of bets were on customer service. And recent data show they are becoming more common in the space. A Salesforce survey found a 42% increase in the share of shoppers who turned to AI-powered chatbots for customer service during the 2024 holiday shopping season compared to the previous year. But as AI becomes more powerful and more human-like, will AI voice agents become the norm, even for those more complicated customer cases now handled by human agents? The BBC’s Elizabeth Hotson looked into what a future of synthetic customer service might look like.

OpenAI closed the year with a bang, announcing a new, powerful AI model called o3. It could mark a significant step toward artificial general intelligence — an advanced form of AI that can learn or understand anything a human can. Plus, we’re mulling another tech prediction for 2025 — will AI assistants actually make our lives easier this year? But first, President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to put the TikTok ban on hold so he might negotiate a deal to save the app in the United States. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.

The explosion of artificial intelligence tools like chatbots has rocked the education world in the last couple years. It’s spurred efforts to prohibit, detect or otherwise build guardrails around these powerful new tools. Some educators, though are embracing them, and Colby College is doing it on an institutional level. Four years ago, before most of the public had ever heard about large language models, this private liberal arts college in Maine established a cross-disciplinary institute for AI to help educators and students integrate the technology into their curricula in an ethical way. We had the college president on back then to discuss, and today we wanted to check back in — this time with Michael Donihue, interim director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College.

Scam calls about fake warranty renewals, non-existent credit card bills and more are still a global problem. But some companies and telecommunication providers are turning to AI chatbots to intercept the calls before they ever reach a real person. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino recently spoke with Dali Kaafar, founder and CEO of Apate AI, an Australia-based company creating these chatbots, about how his company is designing these bots to scam the scammers.

Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional. Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit — and made $150,000 last year by posting content meant to elicit “hate comments.” She’s part of a growing group of online creators making rage-bait content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes. The BBC’s Megan Lawton reports.

Who will win the election? What will the vote margin be? Will Donald Trump post on X before November? People can place bets on all these real-world questions — and more — on prediction markets. And these online platforms like PredictIt and Polymarket are increasingly being looked to as crystal balls in this chaotic election, promising real-time political insights and the chance to make a few bucks. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Chris Cohen, the deputy site editor of GQ, who recently wrote about his experience getting in on the action of what appears to be a prediction market “gold rush.”

More than 20 years ago, executives at rival auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s were found guilty of coordinating a massive price-fixing scheme. Leaders from the companies held covert meetings, where they set identical commission fees. Today, active antitrust cases show that the ways in which companies might conspire are changing. Algorithms can replace secret meetings, but U.S. regulators say it’s still collusion, whether it’s a human or a bot pulling the strings. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Joe Harrington at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School about how antitrust law holds up against new technology.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo of two little girls in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell went viral. They were doing their schoolwork on laptops in that inconvenient location because the restaurant provided free Wi-Fi, which they didn’t have at home. The girls came to symbolize the digital underclass that’s emerged since the rise of the internet. There are millions of American kids like them, says Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her analysis of the digital divide is contained in her new book, “Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass.”

Large language models go through a lot of vetting before they’re released to the public. That includes safety tests, bias checks, ethical reviews and more. But what if, hypothetically, a model could dodge a safety question by lying to developers, hiding its real response to a safety test and instead giving the exact response its human handlers are looking for? A recent study shows that advanced LLMs are developing the capacity for deception, and that could bring that hypothetical situation closer to reality. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Thilo Hagendorff, a researcher at the University of Stuttgart and the author of the study, about his findings.

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta is expanding AI offerings across its products, even as the company gets rid of AI features that haven’t quite landed with consumers. The bottom line? CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year.”Then, the Wall Street Journal’s senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern shares surprises and regrets on her journey as an electric vehicle owner. But first, this week in Congress, the Senate passed the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, and the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, in a rare bipartisan vote — 91 senators voted in favor, with just three opposing these measures, which aim to reduce harm to kids on the internet.

There’s always been something aspirational about the term “smart home.” It was coined by a residential builder association here in the U.S. back in the mid-’80s, long before the inventions we now think of as hallmarks of the smart home. Today, 42% of American households with internet own at least one smart home device, according to the market research firm Parks Associates. In her new book, “Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out,” Heather Suzanne Woods of Kansas State University asks whether that’s a good thing.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, can be a lifesaving technology for patients whose organs have failed. It works, essentially, by performing the functions that a healthy person’s lungs and heart would normally do. While using the machine, many recipients of ECMO treatment can walk, talk, even ride a stationary bike, but they can’t leave the hospital with the machine, nor can they survive without it. In a recent article in The New Yorker, emergency physician and writer Clayton Dalton described these patients as “caught on a bridge to nowhere.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Dalton about the complicated ethics of this technology.

Companies competing in the chatbot wars are using something known in the industry as “the Pile” to train their large language models. It’s a trove of open-source data made up of text scraped from all around the internet, including Wikipedia and the European Parliament. Annie Gilbertson, investigative reporter for Proof News, recently took a deep dive into the Pile and discovered something else: a dataset called “YouTube Subtitles.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Gilbertson about her investigation and how YouTube creators feel about their content being used without their consent.

It’s a rare issue that can bring the political parties together in Congress, and the need to regulate social media companies ranks high on that very short list. Two industry veterans want Congress to create an agency that sets safety and privacy rules for platforms — and enforces them. The status quo, they argue, is like letting airlines fly without Federal Aviation Administration oversight. The idea comes from Anika Collier Navaroli and Ellen Pao. Pao, an attorney and now CEO of Project Include, pushed to ban revenge porn on Reddit during her tenure as interim CEO. Navaroli, an attorney and senior fellow at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was involved in Twitter’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform in 2021, when she was a senior policy expert there. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Navaroli and Pao about their proposal.

On the show today: The ascent of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic Party ticket has stirred the KHive. We’ll look at what the Harris memes mean, in case you just fell out of a coconut tree. Plus, why Waymo is suing alleged vandals of its vehicles in San Francisco. We ask, why now? But first, cookies are here to stay — for a while, anyway. Google is backtracking on its plan, announced in 2020, to do away with the files that advertisers use to track us online. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, about why.

It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars. But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give the companies an unfair advantage. Subsidies certainly help but there are other factors giving Chinese EV’s an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market.

Back in 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the world’s first comprehensive law for people with disabilities. It was seen as making up for an area in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 fell short. “The stark fact remains that people with disabilities were still victims of segregation and discrimination, and this was intolerable,” Bush said. Now, the legislation passed at the dawn of the internet age is being adapted to ensure digital access for everyone. That means ensuring access to captions on web videos to support deaf Americans and the ability to resize text so people with low vision can read it. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with consultant Nicolas Steenhout, who explained how the Department of Justice is updating the rules.

Last Friday felt like something out of a Y2K nightmare after the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, pushed a software update to all its clients — including health care systems, banks and the federal government — that ended up crashing computer systems worldwide. The fallout is still being felt, particularly in the travel sector, as airliners try to reschedule canceled flights while trying to get everything back to normal. It’s also become something of a reminder that the internet and a lot of the online services we rely on are delicate. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Kate Conger, a reporter at The New York Times who recently wrote about this with her colleague David Streitfeld.

Online sales in the U.S. surpassed $14 billion during Amazon Prime Day last week, according to Adobe Analytics. Amazon’s heft and promotional power continue to drive sales, even for rivals, during the shopping jamboree. But in Europe, an important market for the e-commerce giant, lawmakers have become increasingly sensitive to Amazon’s relations with its rivals, as well as its partners and customers. They’ve requested that Amazon hand over information about its product recommendation algorithms, along with data on ads, by Friday. It’s part of compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of tech regulations that took effect in recent years. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discussed it with Theo Wayt, who covers Amazon for The Information.

A new Senate report finds Amazon Prime Day is prime time for warehouse injuries. Plus, Starbucks is teaming up with Mercedes-Benz to supercharge electric vehicle infrastructure. But first, several Silicon Valley billionaires have thrown their support behind former President Donald Trump in his quest to reclaim the White House, thanks in part to his pick for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, a managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on these stories in Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.” In the two decades since the site launched, the website has changed the business of online reviews and our relationship to review culture, even has fake review continue being generated.