In 2019, Catsimatidis made headlines after telling The New York Times that he had used a controversial facial recognition app to do a background check on a man his daughter was on a date with.
The incident occurred after John spotted Andrea dining at a restaurant with a man he didn't know. He had the waiter secretly snap a photo of the date, used the app to identify him, and emailed the results to Andrea.
"I wanted to make sure he wasn't a charlatan," John Catsimatidis told The New York Times.
However, the app he used was an unreleased piece of software at the time. Its searchable database of photos scraped from across the web was only sold to police departments and federal agencies, Clearview says, but reports indicated that it has also given access to other clients, including billionaires like Catsimatidis, retail chains like Walmart and Macy's, the NBA, and even some high schools.
Last year, the company was banned from selling its product to the majority of US companies after the American Civil Liberties Union took the company to court over privacy laws.
At the time, the billionaire said he was friends with a Clearview AI founder, Richard Schwartz, and that he ran a trial project with the app at an East Side Gristedes that was having trouble with shoplifters stealing Häagen-Dazs.
Sources: BBC, Insider, Insider, The New York Times
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