SAN FRANCISCO, July 13 (Xinhua) -- Microsoft President Bradford Smith said Friday that U.S. Congress should show leadership in enhancing federal regulation of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology including facial recognition, amid growing public concern about privacy violation.
"All tools can be used for good or ill" and "Facial recognition technology has been advancing rapidly over the past decade," Smith wrote in a lengthy blog post Friday.
Like some other tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft has recently been questioned for providing facial recognition technology for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was fiercely slammed for enforcing a "family separation" policy resulting in more than 2,300 children grabbed away from their migrant parents at the U.S.-Mexican border.
Microsoft has denied the allegation and argued that it only worked with government agencies on the generic application of facial recognition technology.
"A wide variety of tech companies, Microsoft included, have utilized this technology the past several years to turn time-consuming work to catalog photos into something both instantaneous and useful," Smith, who is also Microsoft's chief legal officer, explained.
The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself, he said.
"We live in a nation of laws, and the government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology," he wrote.
Smith said a government initiative is needed to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission.
"It seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government," said the Microsoft president.