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.

The Curiosity is the latest Mars rover and it’s set to land on the red planet on Sunday. It’s the heaviest rover ever, 2,000 pounds. But besides being bigger than previous rovers, Curiosity is a big step forward in technology: It’ll have cameras that’ll produce the highest resolution images that we’ve seen from Mars yet, and a laser that will pump the energy of a million lightbulbs into the spot the size of the pin for five billionths of a second. Plus, Tech Report Theater with actors in the roles of Yelp reviewers.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act may get its first update since Mark Zuckerberg was a 15-year-old, or April 2000. Since then, Zuckerberg built Facebook and we’ve seen the rise of online social networks lead to growing concern over privacy online, especially for kids. Yet COPPA is pretty much the same as it’s always been. The FTC, which proposed changes to the law, sees a world where online companies have a stricter code of conduct and parents will need to be more hands-on. Plus, according to a recent study, most apps are total failures.

About 700 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan begin testing something called the Soldier Body Unit this month. It’s a series of sensors designed to measure the impact of explosions, like bomb blasts, on a soldier’s head and body. They’ll detect what’s happening within the body during a blast, and could possibly help detects symptoms of health issues. Later on, the data could be used for research outside the military. Plus, the Twitter Olympic Medal Ceremony.

Jury selection is underway in a huge trial involving Apple and Samsung. Apple’s saying, “Hey Samsung! You totally copied the iPhone! No fair!” Samsung says “Nuh-uh! Those are generic designs!” That’s paraphrasing. Samsung is also countersuing Apple. Where this battle goes next will focus on two main areas: how the smartphones on the market today LOOK and how they WORK. It could have huge implications for anyone working on Android products.