Trump retwitted call to exclude Microsoft from federal government contracts

US President Donald Trump retwitted a call to boycott Microsoft. According to the report, the software company should no longer compete for government jobs, because it currently refuses to provide facial recognition technology to the police in the United States.

“They [MS] should be excluded from federal government contracts. There should be consequences if you refuse to sell technology to police departments,” writes Richard Grenell.

He previously served as acting director of the National Intelligence Service within the Trump administration.

Microsoft enjoys lucrative contracts with the government. Most recent one that it has got is providing Pentagon with cloud services.

The American tech giant decided not to sell facial recognition software to police in the United States until its use is regulated by law. The US is currently demonstrating widely against racism and police brutality.

Activists fear that the government can use facial recognition technology to profile people ethnically. In other words, persecute the looters. Amazon previously decided to ban police use of its facial recognition technology for a year. IBM no longer sells facial recognition products at all.