Where Scoring a Face or a Voice Is Actually Barred

Where Is Emotion Scoring Actually Prohibited?

In the European Union. Article 5(1)(f) of the EU AI Act bans using AI systems to infer the emotions of a person in the workplace, except for medical or safety reasons ¹. The prohibition has applied since 2 February 2025 ¹. No United States law bans the practice outright.

The word workplace sounds like something that begins on your first day. The European Commission's guidelines on prohibited practices, dated 29 July 2025, read it more broadly. They say it should also be understood to apply to candidates during the selection and hiring process, and that using emotion recognition during recruitment is prohibited ².

Commission guidelines are an interpretation, not a court ruling.

Two limits sit inside the ban. It reaches inference from biometric data, meaning face, voice and physiology, so a model reading the sentiment of a written answer falls outside it ¹. And it prohibits emotion inference rather than AI video interviewing, so a tool can still record you, transcribe you, and score what you said.

What Do US Rules Ask For Instead?

Consent, in two states, and nothing specific to the interview in most of the rest. Illinois has required since 2020 that an employer tell you beforehand when AI will analyse your recorded video interview for an Illinois-based position ³. The notice has to explain how the AI works and what general characteristics it evaluates, and your consent has to come first ³.

An employer may not use AI to evaluate an applicant who has not consented ³.

Maryland's rule is narrower. Since October 1, 2020 an employer may not create a facial template during an applicant's interview unless the applicant signs a waiver ⁴. The waiver states four things: the applicant's name, the date of the interview, the consent itself, and whether the applicant read it ⁴.

Neither statute names a penalty, and neither gives you a claim of your own.

Illinois has a second law that does. Its Biometric Information Privacy Act counts a voiceprint or a scan of face geometry as a biometric identifier, and expressly excludes photographs and writing samples ⁵. Whether a particular product builds either one is a question of fact about that product.

One docketed case shows how open that question still is. In Deyerler v. HireVue, a federal judge in Illinois let biometric claims proceed in February 2024 ⁶. The allegation was that the software collected candidates' facial geometry, and the company's denial was a factual dispute the judge could not resolve at that stage ⁶.

Surviving a motion to dismiss decides pleading, not truth.

California went a third way. Its amended employment regulations took effect on October 1, 2025 ⁷. They name analysing facial expression, word choice and voice in online interviews as an example of an automated-decision system ⁷. That puts the practice inside existing discrimination law rather than banning it.

Under the same regulations a vendor running the system counts as an employer itself, so buying the tool from somebody else does not move the duty ⁷.

Ask What the System in Front of You Actually Reads

The map says what is allowed where you sit. It does not say what this particular tool does, and the second question is the one that changes how you spend an evening of preparation. HireVue's 2025 explainability statement says its AI relies only on what the candidate said, with no video analysis and no assessment of facial expressions, body language, background or tone of voice ⁸.

That is a company describing its own product, which is not an audit, and it covers one vendor's AI-scored interviews rather than the field.

The fear has a source and a date. In November 2019 the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission ⁹. It quoted HireVue staff saying facial action units could make up 29 percent of a candidate's score ⁹.

Those are an advocacy group's allegations about a design the company says it abandoned, not a regulator's finding.

Wired reported on January 12, 2021 that HireVue said it was killing off facial-expression analysis ¹⁰. Its chief executive said the feature was adding some value for customers but was not worth the concern ¹⁰.

That was one product at one company, and it settles nothing about the next one.

What none of that settles is whether the video goes unwatched. The recording exists, and a person can play it. A rule about what software may infer says nothing about what a human viewer notices. Employers get asked the software half of this from their side: whether an AI notetaker's line about a candidate seeming nervous and rehearsed belongs in the hiring file at all.

For the scoring question on its own, what an AI interview scores and what it does not stays on that ground.

What to Check Before You Sit Down to Record

Read the consent screen for specific words rather than for the letters AI. The Illinois video interview act asks for notice, an explanation of what the system evaluates, and your consent before any analysis happens ³. The biometric statute asks a collector to say in writing what is being collected, for what specific purpose, and for how long ¹¹.

Three questions are worth asking before you record:

• Is a voiceprint or a scan of face geometry created at any point here, including for identity or fraud checks?
• What is kept afterwards: the video, a transcript, or something derived from them?
• If the role sits in Illinois, will the video be destroyed on request, which the statute puts at 30 days ³?

All three fit in one short email.

Where you are applying decides which of these you can lean on. For most people the answer is none of them. A candidate outside Illinois, Maryland, California and the EU is left mostly with general discrimination law and whatever the employer chooses to publish.

That is thinner ground than a headline about a ban suggests.

The screen itself gets a closer reading in what a biometric consent screen is actually asking for. If the worry is that a system marks you down for an accent or a disability, what the record shows about accents and disability is the narrower version.

Ask before the invitation expires, not after the rejection.

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