How do you exclude children from biometric surveillance, such as facial recognition software used by police, when you need to scan their faces to identify them as children?

That was one of the challenges presented during a panel at SXSW on Friday, featuring the privacy activist Cory Doctorow, the FBI’s Christopher Piehota and Brian Brackeen, founder of the facial recognition company Kairos. The panel’s title asked their central question: Are Biometrics the New Face of Surveillance?

As biometric technology becomes more sophisticated, governments and private companies have been building tools for identifying people using their faces, voices, irises and other unique signatures. But there is little oversight of these systems, leaving them open to misuse.

“We are not comfortable with the lack of regulation,” said Brackeen, whose company helps movie studios and ad agencies study emotional responses to their content. Kairos also provides facial recognition to theme parks and cruise lines such as Carnival to let people find and buy photos of themselves.

He said that his facial recognition system is now so good at recognising races, a challenge in the past, that it can be used as a genealogy tool. “It’s coming back with the percentages of race the person is,” he said, mentioning someone who came up 12% Asian despite being Jamaican. “Oh, I have a Chinese grandmother,” she said, according to Brackeen.

Brackeen said Kairos had been pushing for regulation, and that although he believed Karios’ conduct was responsible, he could not say the same for some competitors. He mentioned FindFace, for example, the Russian company that made an app that could analyze images of people and match it to their social media accounts.

The app was supposed to be for finding friends, but members of the online messaging board Dvach started using it to expose identities, harass pornographic actors and spam their families with the news of their discovery.

“That’s wildly offensive to us, but it’s happening,” Brackeen said. “That’s why we need regulations. Not everyone will have the moral compass we have.”

In the government sector, the FBI has access to a database with almost half a billion images that it uses for identification purposes. Some of those are photos collected for criminal or law enforcement purposes, but others come from companies that do background checks for jobs. The FBI also has access to the state department passport and visa databases, which can be cross-referenced with photos of criminal suspects.

Doctorow said there needed to be far more public information on how and when these databases were being used.

“It’s great that you are using photos of missing and exploited children to find them, but are they also retained for law enforcement purposes? We can’t know unless there’s transparency.”

Doctorow referred to a report by the Government Accountability Office that came to the same conclusion, and recommended several measures to better inform citizens and protect privacy.

The FBI’s Piehota acknowledged “there were some things not handled as well as they could have been”, but he argued that the issue was also partly a matter of education. Over time, he said, people have become “pretty comfortable” with having their fingerprints taken.

“My goal is to increase transparency and confidence so people understand why we do it.”