Consider a wide-ranging interview I did during the Code conference last week with Andy Jassy, the sharp chief executive of Amazon Web Services, who defended his company’s facial recognition software . The program is called Rekognition — perhaps one of the creepiest names you could give surveillance software — and can match photos and videos with databases. It has been sold to businesses and law enforcement agencies, and its capabilities scare many, given questions of how and where it is deployed. Some critics, for example, are concerned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be using Rekognition to help deport immigrants, but Mr. Jassy would not comment on whether that agency uses the program or not.

But he made the case that possible abuses of the technology weren’t necessarily Amazon’s responsibility, because any tech tool can be turned into a weapon — even one as benign as email, which was used in the Sony hack a few years ago. “You could use a knife in a surreptitious way,” he said.

Amazon has said problems with Rekognition — including one embarrassing experiment by the American Civil Liberties Union in which the program matched 28 members of Congress to other people’s mug shots — have been largely caused by users not employing the correct settings. It has also issued ethical guidelines for the use of Rekognition. Mr. Jassy said the company would double down on the deployment of the new product, a growing business for Amazon, despite increasing worries, including from some of its own employees, about how it could be abused.

“I strongly believe that just because tech could be misused doesn’t mean we should ban it and condemn it,” said Mr. Jassy, urging the federal government to create a national law to govern its use if it was concerned. “I wish they’d hurry up,” he added. “Otherwise, you’ll have 50 different laws in 50 different states.”

That “we’ll make it until they start making laws” refrain has become common among techies these days, including in a high-profile please-regulate-me op-ed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Still, pressing forward with new and potentially fraught innovations, on Tuesday, the social networking giant uncloaked its Libra project, a new cryptocurrency system aimed at its billions of users. Though the company made sure to stress the many efforts it was making to protect the system’s data and integrity with partners and management by an independent entity, the move begs for stringent regulation. But the release of this offering right in the midst of punishing scrutiny of how the company has bollixed its main platform is what one might call a gangster move. Not literally, fingers crossed.