US justice officials probe Instagram harming children; new Google features for India; plus, a chat with Rahul Nanwani, CEO of ImageKit

A coalition of America’s top justice officials—comprising several state attorney generals—is leading a nationwide investigation into how Instagram knowingly harms children. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is providing and promoting Instagram to children and young adults despite knowing that such use is associated with physical and mental health harms, according to a statement from Maura Healey, one of the state Attorneys General who is co-leading the investigation. Led by founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, or Meta, remains defiant, tech sites such as The Verge have pointed out. Meta even plans to eventually launch an Instagram for children under the age of 13. The company said it would only “pause” that plan after severe opposition from lawmakers across the US. Google has released more features on its products and platforms, aimed at making them more accessible to users in India, including additional local language support, and a way for small businesses and merchants to quickly build an online storefront. In Google search, people can now listen to results being read out to them in their language—available in Hinglish, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. On the Google Pay app, in what Google says is a first for Google globally, the company has added support for ‘Hinglish’—a conversational hybrid of Hindi and English. And MyShop—a functionality available to merchants using the Google Pay for Business app provides merchants a quick store builder tool, where they can add images, descriptions, and prices within minutes and then share the link, through the Business Profile, across Google products and beyond Google on social media. Tata Consultancy Services, one of the world’s biggest IT services companies, found that many finance leaders in companies around the world relied more on instinct than on data, in a survey of 750 such senior executives. Half of the respondents said they are unable to deliver short term forecasts without making significant errors—if they can do it at all, TCS said in a report based on the survey. More than two thirds of those who took the survey plan to invest in cloud-based systems, and will invest in data and analytics technologies for their financial planning and analysis teams in the next year, according to TCS. (2:34) Interview: Rahul Nanwani, co-founder and CEO, ImageKit on staying bootstrapped, being profitable and focused on the product Rahul Nanwani and his two co-founders quit their jobs at a travel company four years ago to build a product that would allow people to quickly make changes to images to suit their needs—like cropping it right for uploading onto to a website. In today’s tech conversation, Rahul gives us a quick update on their bootstrapped company, ImageKit, which is profitably helping customers around world process billions of images.