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    AI Act Prohibited Practices

    Article 5 practices banned outright in the EU, including subliminal manipulation and untargeted facial-recognition scraping.

    Reviewed by Christian Espinosa, Founder, Blue Goat CyberLast reviewed July 25, 2026

    Definition

    Article 5 lists AI practices that are prohibited in the Union, including subliminal or manipulative techniques causing significant harm, exploitation of vulnerabilities, social scoring by public authorities, real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement (with narrow exceptions), untargeted scraping of facial images to build databases, emotion inference at work or school (with medical and safety exceptions), and biometric categorisation inferring sensitive attributes.

    What this means in practice

    Most MedTech products sit well outside these categories, but emotion-inference features in workplace-wellness or education-adjacent digital health products can trigger the prohibition. The medical-purposes exception is narrow: it applies when emotion inference is genuinely part of a medical device's intended purpose, not a marketing add-on.
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    Primary references

    3 sources
    Link health: 3 verified· last checked 2026-06-20
    EUR-Lex·1European Commission·1IMDRF·1
    1. 1
      Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 5
      Verified
      EUR-Lexeur-lex.europa.eu
    2. 2
      European Commission - Medical Devices
      Verified
      European Commissionhealth.ec.europa.eu
    3. 3
      IMDRF Documents
      Verified
      IMDRFimdrf.org

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