Microsoft boss: tech firms must stop 'if it's legal, it's acceptable' approach

Tech companies should stop behaving as though everything that is not illegal is acceptable, says Microsoft's second-in-command. Instead, they should focus on defining – and living by – the standards that they would like to see in regulation, before it gets forced on them anyway. For some of the most potentially dangerous new technologies, such as facial recognition, that could mean voluntarily refusing to sell them to certain countries, for certain uses, or even agreeing to a moratorium altogether, said Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of the world's most valuable publicly-traded company. Speaking to the Guardian before the launch of his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith said that if technology firms wanted to be proud of how they changed the world for the better, they must take more responsibility for the ways they have made it worse. "When you think about all of the issues that people worry about in the world today and what they spend their time arguing about, it's often issues like trade, immigration, nationalism, globalisation," Smith said.