Gristedes billionaire John Catsimatidis found a creepy use for the facial recognition software that helps fight shoplifters at his New York City grocery stores: snooping on his daughter Andrea's dates. "Daddies are always looking after their daughters," Catsimatidis explained to The Post. The doting dad was dining at Cipriani in SoHo when he noticed his daughter Andrea, 29, was there too -- on a date. Fearing that some no good "charlatan" could be insinuating his way into the life of his beautiful, jet-setting, heiress daughter, Catsimatidis had a waiter take and send him a cellphone photo of the mystery man. He uploaded the photo into Clearview AI, and "We retrieved a picture of him in 20 seconds," he said of the October 2018 secret spy mission. The verdict? "He was an OK person," Catsimatidis told The Post.

A billionaire supermarket tycoon used the creepy facial recognition app Clearview AI to investigate his daughter's date as she dined in a Manhattan restaurant. Gristedes Food CEO John Catsimatidis, 71, spotted his daughter, Andrea, on a date with an unfamiliar man while dining at Cipriani Downtown, an Italian restaurant in the SoHo neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan, in the October of 2018. Enlisting a waiter to secure a photo of the mystery individual, Mr Catsimatidis ran the image through the Clearview AI facial recognition system, which cross referenced the image with photos scraped from sites like Facebook and Instagram. The app produced a selection of other images of the man, along with the websites on which they appeared. The billionaire was able to discover that his daughter's date was a venture capitalist who hailed from San Francisco, California -- information he proceeded to text to Ms Catsimatidis from across the restaurant.