The research company Gartner has issued its annual Hype Cycle Report, detailing when different technologies will become part of daily life. Expect paying for stuff with your smartphone to become an everyday thing, and 3D printing too. Jetpacks, though? Don’t ask. Plus, a tech reporter who’s taking a year off the Internet — no web, no email, no texting — and is happier because of it.

The American Civil Liberties Union is filing information requests with nearly 500 police departments in 38 states having to do with License Plate Reader cameras, or LPRs. Apparently, tens of thousands of them are being used around the country. The cameras help police spot cars that may be wanted, but according to the ACLU, the problem lies in the fact that the cameras store people’s license plate numbers for a long time, and there’s not that much known about how the technology is actually being deployed.

Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, 7-11, Best Buy, a whole bunch of big retailers are teaming up on a new mobile payment system. It’s called Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX and it will let you pay for things using your smartphone. They’re not the only ones trying this. Google has the Google Wallet system. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are planning to launch one soon as well. So why is everyone racing to join in? It’s all about being most popular, and eventually getting the most data from you.

On social media platforms, the candidates can’t say enough about the economy. But what citizens are retweeting and sharing and liking isn’t mostly the economy, but other issues which tend to be ones that people feel passionately about like immigration, women’s rights — issues where people feel a personal connection to them. The research indicates that voters might be in the mood for a broader discussion.

Google says if it gets enough complaints about something, it will slide those sites lower in search results, make them harder to discover. That something this time is websites that transmit non-copyrighted material — bootleg music and movies on file-sharing sites. That’s because Google needs to score points with the entertainment industry. It wants to sell more music and movies through its Google Play store. It wants cable channels to play along with Google TV and with Google Fiber. And it could all affect your Google searches.

A new study reveals we spend $20 billion a year on fighting spam. The worst part? Spam doesn’t bring in that much money. Annual revenues for the whole industry at just $200 million — 1 percent of what we spend fighting it. But, time may be running out for the weird business model of the pesky inbox fillers.

Google has been hit with the biggest fine in the history of the Federal Trade Commission: $22.5 million. It has to do with cookies, bits of computer code placed on your browser when you visit a website. Even though the fine is basically chump change to the company, having made $36 billion in revenue last year, it’ll still sting. And it could result in more attention put towards responsible behavior from companies.

The new deal between Starbucks and Square signals a new era of baristas knowing who you are before you enter the store. Starbucks announced it will use the Square payment system for all credit and debit card transactions starting this fall. Starbucks wants to encourage use of Square’s app that lets customers pay for drinks without even taking their phone out of their pockets, using a GPS system. The stars may have aligned for this kind of technology, but the privacy issues can get tricky.

Mitt Romney is being followed by robots. Seriously. On Twitter. The presumptive GOP nominee recently saw a dramatic spike in his follower count: 116,000 in just one day. Most of those followers, however, are fakes. Twitter is crawling with fake people. Why? Money. And while these bots are mostly harmless, the technology is improving, making it increasingly difficult to tell who’s real or who’s not.