Thursday 24 January 2019 5:44 pm | Updated: Monday 03 June 2019 3:00 am

Microsoft chief Satya Nadella calls for facial recognition regulation as Bing gets switched back on in China

The boss of software giant Microsoft has said facial recognition technology needs to be regulated, as the company weathers another storm in China.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, chief executive Satya Nadella said that self-regulation when it comes to facial recognition may not be enough as the technology grows more popular.

Such tech has become a mainstay of Samsung's Galaxy and Apple's iPhone products, opting to ditch the home button in favour of more futuristic security protocols. However it has led to disputes among lawmakers and regulators alike, asking questions such as whether police should be allowed to unlock a person's phone using their face without their permission.

"One of the things that I feel today is, in the marketplace, there's competition. There's no discrimination between the right use and the wrong use of facial recognition," said Nadella.

And while self-regulation today might be "fair and robust" enough to handle such issues, tech firms should "also welcome any regulation that helps the marketplace not be a race to the bottom".

His comments came as Microsoft said today that its search engine Bing had been blocked in China, making it the last foreign technology service to have been burned by the country's so-called Great Firewall.

However reports later emerged this evening that Bing had been re-activated, as Bloomberg said it had been able to access the search engine again.

Earlier in the day the Financial Times, citing a source, said that a state-owned Chinese telecoms company had confirmed the government had ordered a block on the service.

Bing had been the only major foreign search engine left behind the Great Firewall, after Google was blocked in 2010 for its refusal to censor search results the government considered to be sensitive.