This volume explores the development of social scoring tools from a historical and comparative perspective. The aim is to dispel widespread misconceptions about social scoring, and to better understand the benefits and the dangers it generates. The book shows that social scoring was not born as a hyper-technological tool for behavioural control in twenty-first century China. Rather, it slowly emerged in the West from earlier pre-digital experiments with social quantification carried out from the early twentieth century onwards. Recent technological developments have made social scoring virtually ubiquitous. Yet, as the book demonstrates, practices of social scoring never occur in a vacuum. Legal cultures and rules play a crucial role in shaping social scoring uses. Understanding the legal dimension of social scoring is therefore fundamental for appreciating at what conditions social scoring, instead of working as an efficient and neutral mechanism to decide who is to be trusted, turns into a dangerous weapon of social exclusion. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of comparative law, law and technology, and quantitative techniques for social sciences.

Marta Infantino is Professor of Comparative Private Law, University of Trieste, Italy