The Tech Weekender: Top news from the world of technology this week

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Instagram has rolled out a feature to tag products in feed posts for everyone in the US. Previously, the feature was limited to creator and brand accounts but is now available to everyone with a public account in the US.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has denied reports the privacy-focused search engine was purging results for popular “pirate” sites, tweeting that the allegations were "completely made up". Weinberg said the company was not "purging" any search results and "anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results". He blamed the missing results on the site: operator function and said they were "having issues which we are looking into".

New listings posted on Amazon Jobs hint that the multinational technology company is working on a device that will be a "new-to-world smart-home product”. Online publication Protocol spotted the job listing which was looking for potential hires for a project related to "XR/AR devices". This would include developing code for "early prototypes through mass production".

Mastodon, which has been pitted as an alternative to microblogging platform Twitter, has now officially released an app for Android. The platform launched on iOS in July last year. Mastodon is an open-source platform for running self-hosted social networking services. It is a decentralised service that has no single entity or server overseeing it. It claims to be community-owned and ad-free. Users set up their private servers and host them based on multiple categories such as gaming, technology and journalism.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the country's flagship payments processor, has announced a hiring campaign that aims to recruit over 250 graduate engineering trainees across the country. NPCI will also offer a "Learn DeepTech while you Earn" programme for the trainees to pursue a one-year post-graduate certification in artificial intelligence or blockchain from a reputed institution. The trainees will be placed at NPCI’s facilities in key metros across India. Fresh graduates will get to work on products like UPI, RuPay, and FASTag that touch the lives of millions every day.

Netflix recently said it lost 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter of 2022, the first time the streaming service witnessed a subscriber drop since 2011, causing the stock to tank. The company cited password sharing as the main reason for the drop in paid subscribers. The streaming service has pledged to go after subscribers who are sharing passwords. Netflix claims that around 100 million households globally share passwords. It has 222 million “paying households”, 30 million of which are based in the US and Canada.