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.

Siri’s got a new cousin: Nina. She’s a voice recognition personal assistant meant to work within apps. You would interact with it just like you would Siri, but within that application, you have the option at any time to basically invoke Nina as an assistant to help you get work done. Still, Nina may have the same voice recognition problems that Siri has.

Used to be you’d get TV shows sent from TV stations to your TV. Well, everything’s getting all crazy and now you get video all over the place. The traditional TV networks and cable companies might not be too fond of this new TV-all-over-the-place system, and they might try to bring it back under their control. But it also may be too late.