The following AI practices shall be prohibited: g) the placing on the market, the putting into service for this specific purpose, or the use of biometric categorisation systems that categorise individually natural persons based on their biometric data to deduce or infer th eir race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex-life or sexual orientation; this prohibition does not cover any labelling or filtering of lawfully acquired biometric datasets, such as images, based on biometric data or categorising of biometric data in the area of law enforcement;
Several cumulative conditions must be fulfilled for the prohibition in Article 5(1)(g) AI Act to apply:
The practice must constitute the ‘placing on the market’, ‘the putting into service for this specific purpose’ or ‘the use’ of an AI system;
The system must be a biometric categorisation system;
individual persons must be categorised;
based on their biometric data;
to deduce or infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex-life, or sexual orientation.
For the prohibition to apply, all five conditions must be simultaneously fulfilled. The first condition, i.e. the placing on the market, the putting into service or the use of the AI system , is analysed in sectio n 2.3. The prohibition, therefore, applies to both providers and deployers of AI systems, each within their respective responsibilities, not to place on the market, put into service or use such AI systems. The other conditions for the application of the prohibition174 are further described and analysed below.
The prohibition does not cover the labelling or filtering of lawfully acquired biometric datasets, including for law enforcement purposes.