Vladimir Putin was not in attendance, but his loyal lieutenants were. On 14 July last year, the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and several members of his cabinet convened in an office building on the outskirts of Moscow. On to the stage stepped a boyish-looking psychologist, Michal Kosinski, who had been flown from the city centre by helicopter to share his research. "There was Lavrov, in the first row," he recalls several months later, referring to Russia's foreign minister. "You know, a guy who starts wars and takes over countries." Kosinski, a 36-year-old assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, was flattered that the Russian cabinet would gather to listen to him talk. "Those guys strike me as one of the most competent and well-informed groups," he tells me. Kosinski's "stuff" includes groundbreaking research into technology, mass persuasion and artificial intelligence (AI) – research that inspired the creation of the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Five years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, he showed how even benign activity on Facebook could reveal personality traits – a discovery that was later exploited by the data-analytics firm that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

On the first day of school, a child looks into a digital camera linked to the school's computer. Upon a quick scan, the machine reports that the child's facial contours indicate a likelihood toward aggression, and she is tagged for extra supervision. Not far away, another artificial intelligence screening system scans a man's face. It deduces from his brow shape that he is likely to be introverted, and he is rejected for a sales job. Plastic surgeons, meanwhile, find themselves overwhelmed with requests for a "perfect" face that doesn't show any "bad" traits.

You won't find more enthusiastic supporters of the Fourth Industrial Revolution than us, as long as the technology is solid, the business plan is sound and society progresses toward a better future for all of us. And then there's isht out there that scares the bejesus out of us, stoking our worst dystopian fears, like the return of Roseanne Barr to prime time TV. Israeli startup Faception and its facial recognition technology is another one of those things. Started with a very modest Seed round of just $125,000 in December 2015, Faception followed with an undisclosed Series A last summer. The company came on our radar while researching a recent article on the use of artificial intelligence and real-time object recognition Terminator-style.

Israeli startup Faception made headlines this year by claiming it could predict how likely people are to be terrorists, pedophiles, and more by analyzing faces with deep learning. Experts and research in the field, however, suggest that it is more fantasy than reality. Faception assigns ratings after training artificial intelligence on faces of terrorists, pedophiles, Mensa members, professional poker players, and more. Through deep learning--that emerging technique found in everything from Alpha Go to Siri to Netflix--the AI can supposedly predict how likely a new face is to belong to any given group. While this may sound believable, there's no evidence that face-based personality predictions are more than a tiny bit accurate.

It's no mystery that big data presents a challenge to privacy. But perhaps more alarming is the emergence of technology that combines facial recognition and data analytics to create a powerful surveillance tool. It's a disturbing development that combines the most worrisome aspects of algorithmic and big data technology with the chilling and dangerous threats inherent in facial recognition. A Chicago tech company is advertising its "predictive video" to anticipate behavior "based on the emotional state and personality style of any person in a video." In Russia, the app FindFace gives users "the power to identify total strangers on the street," according to The Atlantic. Google's new chat app Allo has a "smart reply" feature that apparently analyzes photos from contacts and offers suggested responses to them .

Can software identify complex personality traits simply by analysing your face? Faception, a start-up based in Tel Aviv, Israel, courted controversy this week when it claimed its tech does just that. And not just broad categories such as introvert or extrovert: Faception claims it can spot terrorists, paedophiles – and brand promoters. "Using automated feature extraction is standard for face recognition and emotion recognition," says Raia Hadsell, a machine vision engineer at Google DeepMind. The controversial part is what happens next.

Faception thinks it can identify potential terrorists just by their faces. As humans, we're taught at an early age to not judge people by the way they look. And that's for a good reason--people's natures aren't defined by their physical appearance. Faception, a startup backed by legitimate venture capitalists, thinks you can judge a book by its cover. They claim their artificial intelligence algorithms can look at faces and tell which ones are likely to be terrorists, professional poker players, pedophiles, or (worst of all) brand promoters, as reported by The Washington Post.

A company claims it can identify terrorists, paedophiles and ace poker players simply by looking at their face. Faception, an Israeli start-up, says its technology can spot character traits that are undetectable to the naked eye. The company claims its software classified nine of the 11 Paris massacre jihadists as terrorists from their facial features without inputting any prior knowledge of their involvement. It appears to have been so successful, the firm says it is now working with a homeland security agency to help identify criminals. Shai Gilboa, Faception chief executive, said: 'We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other.