By Tom Roberts
Did the owner of Gristedes, John Catsimatidis, employ the latest in facial recognition software to gather information on the guys dating his daughter?
In an interview in the New York Post, Catsimatidis answered in the affirmative.
“Daddies are always looking after their daughters,” he reportedly told the newspaper.
“The doting dad was dining at Cipriani in SoHo when he noticed his daughter Andrea, 29, was there too — on a date,” the Post reported. “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 guy being scanned turned out not to be an evil-doer – but in any case, he apparently never even know it was happening.
The billionaire first became acquainted with the software in a bid to decrease shoplifting in his stores beginning nearly four years ago.
Most importantly, the billionaire’s daughter Andrea told the New York Times that she held no ill will toward her protective dad. “I expect my dad to be able to do crazy things. He’s very technologically savvy. My date was very surprised.”
In a recent feature story titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It,” the Times warned that “… without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”
On its web site, the company makes it clear that “Clearview is an after-the-fact research tool. Clearview is not a surveillance system and is not built like one. For example, analysts upload images from crime scenes and compare them to publicly available images… Just like other research systems, Clearview results legally require follow-up investigation and confirmation. Clearview was designed and independently verified to comply with all federal, state, and local laws… Clearview helps to exonerate the innocent, identify victims of child sexual abuse and other crimes, and avoid eyewitness lineups that are prone to human error.”