Concepts

Who owns what your brain emits?

31AI analysisDocumented

An idea drawn from this archive’s research and journal, either the author’s own speculation or generated by AI, and labelled as such.

Consumer neurotechnology already exists and is already sold: EEG headbands for meditation, focus trackers, sleep monitors, gaming headsets. In April 2024 the Neurorights Foundation published an assessment of the privacy practices of thirty such companies. Twenty-nine of the thirty appeared to have access to the consumer's neural data with no meaningful limitation on that access. Twenty-nine could transfer data to third parties, and twenty said so explicitly. Fewer than half — fourteen of thirty — gave the consumer any stated right to delete it. Only twelve offered both withdrawal of consent and deletion. Eight had no publicly available privacy policy at all. Nothing here was hidden. These are the companies' own published terms, read carefully by people who then counted. The question of who owns what a brain emits is not waiting on some future technology to become urgent. It was answered commercially, in advance, in documents nobody reads.

  • Genser, Damianos & Yuste, 'Safeguarding Brain Data: Assessing the Privacy Practices of Consumer Neurotechnology Companies', Neurorights Foundation, April 2024
  • 30 companies assessed; 29 appear to have access to neural data with no meaningful limitation
  • 29 of 30 can transfer data to third parties; 20 state so explicitly
  • 14 of 30 extend an explicit right to delete; 12 offer both withdrawal of consent and deletion
  • 8 of 30 publish no accessible privacy policy

Open questions

  • The report assesses published policies, not actual conduct. What a company reserves the right to do is not proof it has done it.
  • It does not establish that any neural data has been sold, to whom, or for what.
  • Consumer EEG measures electrical activity at the scalp. What can be inferred from that signal is a separate question this concept does not answer.

References

The report is cited for its own count of published policies. The linked concepts describe adjacent markets and neither corroborates this one.

Not independently verified

This concept reports a published assessment of companies' own privacy policies. It does not establish that any company has misused neural data, nor that any transfer has occurred.

Topics: Technology · Surveillance & memory access

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