The police and other authorities should suspend use of automatic facial recognition technologies, according to an influential group of MPs.
The House of Commons Science and Technology committee added there should be no further trials of the tech until relevant regulations were in place.
It raised accuracy and bias concerns.
And it warned that police forces were failing to edit a database of custody images to remove pictures of unconvicted individuals.
"It is unclear whether police forces are unaware of the requirement to review custody images every six years, or if they are simply 'struggling to comply'," the committee's report said.
"What is clear, however, is that they have not been afforded any earmarked resources to assist with the manual review and weeding process."
As a consequence, the MPs warned, innocent people's pictures might illegally be included in facial recognition "watch lists" that are used in public spaces by the police to stop and even arrest suspects.
The committee noted that it had flagged similar concerns a year ago but had seen little progress from the Home Office since. By contrast, it said, the Scottish Executive had commissioned an independent review into how biometric data should be used and stored.
The report comes a week after the Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he backed police trials of facial recognition systems, while acknowledging that longer-term use would require
Earlier this month, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said the police's use of live facial recognition tech raised "significant privacy and data protection issues" and might even breach data protection laws.
The civil rights group Liberty has also supported a legal challenge to South Wales Police's use of the technology in a case that has yet to be ruled on by a judge at Cardiff High Court.
And the Surveillance Camera Commissioner Tony Porter has criticised trials by London's Metropolitan Police saying: "We are heading towards a dystopian society where people aren't trusted, where they are logged and their data signatures are tracked".
The Home Office, however, has noted that there is public support for live facial recognition to identify potential terrorists and people wanted for serious violent crimes.
"The government believes that there is a legal framework for the use of live facial recognition technology, although that is being challenged in the courts and we would not want to pre-empt the outcome of this case," said a spokesman.
"However, we support an open debate about this, including how we can reduce the privacy impact on the public.
It also recently revealed that Kent and West Midlands' forces plan to test facial recognition software to retrospectively analyse CCTV recordings to spot missing and vulnerable people.
"The public would expect the police to consider all new technologies that could make them safer," a spokesman for the National Police Chiefs' council told the BBC.
"Any wider roll out of this technology must be based on evidence showing it to be effective with sufficient safeguards and oversight."
Racial and gender bias
As part of its report, the committee highlighted earlier work that had raised concerns of bias.
It referred specifically to a government advisory group that had warned in February that facial recognition systems could produce inaccurate results if they had not been trained on a diverse enough range of data./BBC news