For Heads-of · Practitioner

AI-driven social scoring

An AI system evaluates or classifies people over time based on social behaviour or inferred characteristics, leading to detrimental or unfavourable treatment.

  • critical
  • prohibited-practice
  • social-scoring
  • eu-ai-act

How it happens

A system aggregates signals about a person's behaviour or characteristics across contexts unrelated to the original purpose the data was gathered for, and uses the resulting score to determine how they are treated in a different context.

Why it matters

The harm isn't the scoring itself, it's the context collapse: using unrelated behavioural signals to gate access to opportunities is exactly the pattern this prohibition was written to stop.

Mitigating controls

The controls that address this risk, ranked by effectiveness.

No controls mapped to this risk yet.

Framework and clause references

FrameworkClauseTitle
OECD AI PrinciplesHuman RightsHuman rights and democratic values, including fairness and privacy
EU AI ActArticle 5(c)Social scoring

Related resources

The external sources behind this risk, from the Resources library.