Profiling is the automated processing of personal data to evaluate personal aspects of a person – their behaviour, interests, reliability or economic situation. If a decision is made on this basis exclusively by automated means and has a legal effect or a similarly significant impact, special rules apply: such decision-making is permissible only on the basis of a contract, a law, or explicit consent, and the person has the right to human intervention, to express their point of view, and to contest the decision. Companies encounter this when assessing creditworthiness, when automatically rejecting job applicants, or when a system declines an order. Ordinary marketing segmentation generally does not fall into this category, but it must still be disclosed in the privacy policy.
See also: AI in Recruitment, Explainability of AI decisions, Data subject rights.
