Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

Facial recognition was the type of issue where we sometimes diverged from others in the tech sector. Perhaps more than anything else, this reflected what we had learned from our antitrust battles in the 1990s. At that time, we had argued, like many companies and industries, that regulation was unnecessary and likely to be harmful. But one of the many lessons we’d learned from that experience was that such an approach didn’t necessarily work—or would be regarded as unacceptable—for products that have a sweeping impact across society or that combine beneficial and potentially troubling uses. We no longer shared the resistance that most tech companies traditionally had shown for government intervention. We’d already fought that battle. Instead we had endorsed what we thought of as a more active but balanced approach to regulation. That was one reason we called for federal privacy legislation in the United States as early as 2005.