In December, Microsoft President Brad Smith urged lawmakers to set rules on facial-recognition technology to prevent a privacy-threatening “ race to the bottom.” Now the company has joined a legislative fight in its home state against rules it says would be too restrictive.

Microsoft is pushing back on a bill sponsored by a bipartisan group of Washington state lawmakers that would ban local and state governments from using facial recognition until certain conditions are met, including a report by the state attorney general certifying that systems in use are equally accurate for people of differing races, skin tones, ethnicities, genders, or age.

Microsoft has endorsed a different bipartisan privacy bill, modeled on European data laws. It contains less restrictive facial-recognition rules, which closely mirror Smith’s proposals from December. It requires notices to be posted in public premises using facial recognition and requires government agencies to obtain a court order to watch for specific people in public, unless there is an emergency posing risk of serious injury.

That bill has its own opponents, including the ACLU, which drafted the moratorium bill, which also is supported by groups representing immigrants, Muslims, and criminal defense attorneys. Shankar Narayan, director of the technology and liberty project of the ACLU’s Washington chapter, says requiring public notice of face recognition won’t check its use, and he warns that authorities could use the “emergency” exception as a loophole. “Microsoft’s bill has us heading to a world where face surveillance is ubiquitous and the norm,” Narayan says.

The Washington State Capitol in Olympia, where lawmakers have held hearings on two competing bills to regulate facial recognition. Dave Brenner/Getty Images

Reuven Carlyle, a Democratic state senator and primary sponsor of the privacy bill preferred by Microsoft, counters that the state attorney general would quickly act if law enforcement tried to exploit the emergency provision, and he worries that the ACLU-backed bill would stifle innovation. “They want the default to be that you cannot use this technology,” he says. “I don’t believe in the premise of government deciding that a commercial application can or can’t be used.”

Microsoft declined to make anyone available Wednesday to discuss the bills. A company attorney, Natasha Crampton, spoke out against the moratorium bill at a legislative committee hearing earlier this month. “It puts in place a moratorium and restrictions on use that will in practice block many positive government uses of facial recognition technology,” Crampton said, a line that was echoed by a representative of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.