Information commissioner Christopher Graham is pressing ministers for new privacy safeguards in the wake of a report that suggests moves towards a surveillance society are expanding and intensifying.

The study by the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), which was requested by the Commons home affairs committee, is an update to their findings in 2006 which prompted the previous commissioner to warn that Britain was "sleepwalking into a surveillance society".

The SSN says that the warning is no less cogent now than it was in 2006 and cites the developing use of unmanned drones, full body search scanners and workplace surveillance techniques to monitor employees as worrying indicators of what is to come.

Their report says that use of CCTV systems has become even more widespread in recent years and is now a routine feature of most urban public spaces. Yet despite its public and political support the relative ineffectiveness of CCTV in tackling crime remains a concern.

There continues to be a major problem with CCTV systems and automatic number plate recognition [ANPR] cameras that can read thousands of car number plates an hour and identify their owners through a live DVLA link. The authors say this undermines transparency and accountability: "Visual, covert, database and other forms of surveillance have proceeded apace and it has been a challenge for regulators, who often have limited powers at their disposal, to keep up."

It says that there is now a far better informed debate than in 2006 – surveillance proved an election issue with the coalition government committed to 'rolling back" the database state. "However, there are still too many areas where surveillance continues to intensify and expand," says the report.

"Technologies that used to be the subject of speculation have moved into mainstream use. The linking and sharing of data from different databases, development of facial recognition, the increased rollout of ANPR, private sector data gathering and analysis and increased information sharing are of particular concern."

Amongst the many other examples it cites are:

• Although the monitoring of internet use by staff and tracking their movements by GPS applications on their mobiles is already commonplace, the report highlights some worrying new trends in workplace monitoring. They include the use of CCTV in classrooms ostensibly to control pupil behaviour but also used to monitor teacher performance. One Japanese company has even adapted the mapping and "accelerometer" functions on mobile phones to monitor a cleaner's actions such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking or even emptying a rubbish bin. The "accelerometer" can act as a spirit level by analysing the speed and direction of the mobile phone, in this case strapped to a cleaner's waist.

• The recent trial by Merseyside police of the use of unmanned helicopter drones in UK civilian airspace which can record hi-resolution visible and infra-red images from heights of 500m: "It is quite probable that the use of drones will become more commonplace in covert surveillance, and will feature in the policing of the 2012 Olympic Games," says the SSN.

• The "e-borders" programme under which the details of more than 137 million journeys in and out of Britain have already been logged since 2005 to be held in an active database for five years and then archived for a further five years. The data is checked against "watch lists" which are being developed into "no-fly lists". The report notes that the ethical implications of such total data collection are yet to be resolved in a series of privacy challenges by the EU.

Graham said the report demonstrated that much tougher privacy safeguards were needed, including post-legislative scrutiny on new laws and the use of "sunset clauses" for legislation that poses a high privacy risk.

"The report I've presented to parliament today clearly makes the case for government departments to build post-legislative scrutiny into their work as a key way of ensuring the successful delivery of the new transparency and privacy agenda," he said.