While AI-enabled scoring can bring benefits to steer good behaviour, improve safety, efficiency or quality of services, there are certain ‘social scoring’ practices that treat or harm people unfairly and amount to social control and surveillance. The prohibition in Article 5(1)(c) AI Act targets such unacceptable AI-enabled ‘social scoring’ practices that assess or classify individuals or groups based on their social behaviour or personal characteristics and lead to detrimental or unfavourable treatment, in particular where the data comes from multiple unrelated social contexts or the treatment is disproportionate to the gravity of the social behaviour. The ‘social scoring’ prohibition has a broad scope of application in both public and private contexts and is not limit ed to a specific sector or field.105
At the same time, the prohibition is not intended to affect lawful practices that evaluate people for specific purposes that are legitimate and in compliance with Union and national law,106 in particular where those laws specify the types of data relevant for the specific evaluation purposes and ensure that any resulting d etrimental or unfavourable treatment of persons is justified and proportionate (see section 4.3. out of scope).