For lots of popular YouTubers, merchandise is the key to making real money. And 24-year-old Karina Garcia is like the fairy-tale merch story. She was a waitress who dropped out of college and then made her first crafty DIY YouTube video in 2015. Now she’s got more than 7 million subscribers, and if your kids are begging you to make slime at home, she’s why. Garcia launched the slime phenomenon in 2016 with fun variations like bubble wrap slime and glitter. She told CNBC that her business makes about $2 million a year. Now she’s got a line of at-home craft kits under the Craft City brand at Target. As part of Marketplace Tech’s coverage of the growing “creator economy” of online and social media stars, Molly Wood talks with Garcia about making the move from the screen to the store. (09/10/18)

It’s been one year since Equifax announced a giant hack four months after criminals stole the sensitive, personal information of more than 147 million people. And in that year, not a whole lot has changed. No federal data breach notification laws, no big changes to how credit agencies collect information or tell you what they’re collecting. Equifax’s stock is almost back up to where it started. One thing that has happened — Equifax has spent $200 million beefing up its security. That was part of a deal with eight states that let it avoid fines in exchange for protecting our data better. We dig into this in Quality Assurance, the Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Molly talks with Lily Hay Newman, a security reporter for Wired. (09/07/18)

Facebook is still trying to convince lawmakers and the public that it’s making its business more transparent. But new research suggests the message isn’t getting through. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans really don’t understand why they see what they see in their news feeds. Molly Wood talks about the poll with Aaron Smith, associate director of research on internet and technologies issues at Pew. (09/06/18)

Ephemeral marketing is a big trend in social media advertising. You may know it as “stories.” Snapchat started the idea with short video or picture updates that disappear after 24 hours. Instagram copied the feature successfully, and this summer announced it had 400 million daily users on Instagram Stories. Over a million brands are creating Instagram Stories, and according to numbers Facebook released back in May, agencies are investing about 8 percent of their digital marketing budgets in the form. Kate Talbot is a marketing consultant who wrote a book on using Snapchat for business in 2016. Marcus Collins is chief consumer connections officer at the Doner advertising agency. Both tell Molly Wood that branded stories are a hit with audiences, and their disappearing act increases the appeal. (09/05/18)

Facebook, Twitter and Google have been invited to Capitol Hill to testify Wednesday in hearings about possible bias on their platforms. The companies have all been pledging to do better in recent months. But their platforms have been used, in some cases, to undermine democracy, incite violence and spread hate speech, among other ills. Jane McGonigal is a game developer and researcher at the Institute for the Future. That group, partnered with others, just released an online toolkit that they call an “ethical operating system.” It includes questions and exercises to help aspiring Googles and Facebooks “not be evil.” Molly Wood spoke with McGonigal about how it could help tech companies create more ethical products. (09/04/18)

Labor Day is the perfect day for the last installment of our summer entertainment series. The movie “Demolition Man” is set in 2032. It portrays a utopian society with no crime or bad thoughts. Sandra Bullock plays a rookie future cop. Wesley Snipes is a supervillain on the loose. And Sylvester Stallone is the old-school violent cop brought out of cryostasis to hunt him down. Its 1993 tech predictions were solid. It had self-driving cars, video conferencing, voice-activated technology and even touch-screen tablets. Amy Webb is a futurist and professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business. And she also consults on future tech for movies and TV. Molly Wood asked her how well “Demolition Man” did at predicting the future. (09/03/18)

Back in June, California passed the strictest online privacy law in the country, set to go into effect in 2020. The law would, among other things, require companies to be more transparent about what data they collect and why, tell people whom they’re sharing it with and let consumers delete personal information. The United States has no federal online privacy laws. But some tech companies are so worried about the effects of California’s law that they’re now asking for nationwide rules. Molly Wood talks with New York Times technology reporter Cecilia Kang, who’s been covering the topic, for a deeper take. (08/31/18)

This week’s shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, was broadcast live on Twitch, the streaming platform acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars in 2016. Two people were killed while they were competing in a Madden NFL video game tournament. The shooter later killed himself. Twitch has removed video of the shooting from its site (although it’s still available elsewhere online) and announced increased security for its annual TwitchCon gathering in October. Electronic Arts, maker of the Madden video game, said it’s canceling three upcoming esports events. The entire business model of esports is built on live streaming competitive video game playing. So how might Twitch respond? We talk with Dmitri Williams from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism about the responsibility streaming services have over what goes out on their platforms. (08/30/18)

Facebook is one of the only sources of news in Myanmar, where the government has engaged in serious human rights abuses against its minority Rohingya population, according to the United Nations. Politicians and activists have been warning Facebook that hate speech and misinformation on its platform have helped spread violence against the Rohingya. In 2014, for example, false messages helped create a riot that killed two people. This week, Facebook did finally ban some people and groups, including the country’s commander in chief. Zeynep Tufekci, who studies the impact of technology on society and politics, tells Molly Wood that Facebook went into Myanmar with just tech in mind, not the impact it might have on societies around the world. (08/29/18)