Protecting our brain data

More states are enacting laws to protect information generated by a person’s brain and nervous system as technology increases the ability to unlock the details of a person’s health, mental states, emotions, and cognitive functioning, says KFF.

Colorado, California and Montana are among the states that recently have required safeguarding brain data collected by devices outside medical settings. Those devices include headphones, earbuds and other wearable consumer products designed to improve sleep, focus and aging by measuring electrical activity and sending the data to an app on users’ phones.

A report by the Neurorights Foundation, an advocacy group to protect people from the misuse of neurotechnology, says 29 of 30 companies with neurotechnology products that can be purchased online have access to brain data and “provide no meaningful limitations to this access.” Nearly all of them can share data with third parties.

The American Medical Association called in June for increased regulation of neural data.

Chile in 2021 became the first country to adopt a constitutional amendment for neurorights, which prioritize human rights in the development of neurotechnology and collection of neural data, and UNESCO has said neurotechnology and artificial intelligence together could pose a threat to human identity and autonomy.

Already, scientists have used a cap with 128 electrodes and an AI model to decode the brain’s electric signals from thoughts into speech. Two years ago, a study described how neuroscientists reconstructed the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall” by analyzing the brain signals of 29 epilepsy patients who listened to the song with electrodes implanted in their brains.

“If you collect the data today, what can you read from it five years from now because the technology is advancing so quickly?” says Democratic state Sen. Cathy Kipp, who sponsored Colorado’s 2024 neural data protection bill when she was in the state House of Representatives.

Cristin Welle, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, says AI’s ability to identify patterns is a game changer in her field. “But contribution of a person’s neural data on an AI training set should be voluntary. It should be an opt-in, not a given.”