Marketplace Tech

Girl Scout cookie sales started back in 1917. In addition to raising money, cookie selling is also meant to make the girls more business savvy. The Girl Scouts say it's the largest girl led entrepreneurial program in the world. And now, some of that entrepreneurship is happening online. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Wendy Lou, who oversees the cookie program as the chief revenue officer at Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She says last season, digital transactions accounted for more than 40 percent of cookie sale revenue.

The 39.4 million people who live in California now have a new tool where they can request that data brokers delete their personal information. That may include their online search histories, social security numbers and where they work, among other identifying data.

The tool is called the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP). It was mandated by a 2023 state law called the “Delete Act.” Data brokers have until August to start processing these requests. Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it could limit the sale of our information.

Meta and News Corp reached a licensing deal this week. Plus, defense contractors untangle Claude from their workflows.

But first, the online prediction marketplace Kalshi lets users bet on the outcome of many things that can happen in the future. One bet that saw a lot of action was whether Ali Khamenei would be ousted as the supreme leader in Iran. Khamenei was killed over the weekend during a U.S. military strike.

Kalshi didn’t pay out the bets that were placed after Khamenei’s death. Instead, it reimbursed those traders. And this outraged some users on the site. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these headlines from the week in tech.

As the war in the Middle East intensifies, one risk facing American banks is the possibility of cyber attacks by hackers linked to Iran.

There is some historical precedent for this: from late 2011 to mid-2013, nearly 50 financial institutions in the U.S. were attacked repeatedly by a group of hackers aligned with the Iranian government. The attacks disabled bank websites and prevented customers from accessing their accounts.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Rafe Pilling, Director of Threat Intelligence with the cybersecurity firm Sophos about what those attacks looked like and whether banks are better equipped to fend off those attacks now.

You've probably heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. That's what you need to do to get your shoe brand or your coffee shop or your public radio show picked up and pushed out by a search engine. Now, with more people using AI to search for things, these brands have to work on what's being called AEO, or "answer engine optimization." When someone asks Chat GPT "where do I get good coffee in Baltimore?" Your brand shows up. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Erin Griffith, a reporter at the New York Times, about what companies can do to make the AI look their way.