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.

The date turned out to be a dad-stamp-of-approval-worthy San Francisco venture capitalist.

Catsimatidis said the date, whom he declined to name, “never knew” of the surveillance.

“I just smiled a lot” when he stopped by the table, the protective dad said.

Catsimatidis began using — and investing in — the software in his Manhattan and Brooklyn grocery chain after a rash of shoplifting in 2016.

At the time, thieves were sneaking out of his stores with gym-bags stuffed with $6 Häagen-Dazs pints they’d then resell to bodegas.

“We have not used it in Gristedes beyond an initial, one-store trial,” he added.

But the Clearview AI tech is controversial — it is currently under scrutiny by US senators, who are concerned about privacy issues and whether it will find its way into the hands of authoritarian regimes.

Last month, Facebook and YouTube demanded the company stop scraping faces from their sites.

Meanwhile, Andrea and her date didn’t hold the vetting against her protective father, she told The Times, which first reported the snooping as part of a story on how the technology has been a plaything for rich investors.

In fact, she laughed it off as dad just being dad.

“I expect my dad to be able to do crazy things,” she said. “He’s very technologically savvy,” she told The Times, adding, “My date was very surprised.”

“She loved the fact that her daddy was concerned,” Catsimatidis told The Post.