Neural privacy: Mind reading tech poses human rights threat, warns UN

Jonathan Moens

The scenarios sound straight out of science fiction: police officers accessing data contained in suspects’ brains to forcefully extract information, or to predict if offenders might plan to commit future crimes.

However, the UN has warned for the first time that neurotechnologies are advancing so rapidly that the ability of governments to access and manipulate people’s brains could soon pose a direct threat to fundamental human rights.

The abuse of future technologies, Secretary-General António Guterres warned, could lead to arbitrary detentions, the alteration of people’s mental states and infringements on privacy.

“Neurotechnology, including new and emerging forms, raises profound human rights challenges,” the UN secretary-general wrote. “Its expansion beyond clinical settings into investigative, judicial and correctional contexts introduces significant risks, alongside potential benefits.”

To address such threats, the report lists several recommendations, including regulations consistent with international law, recognising thoughts as “highly sensitive personal data” and requiring explicit consent for the use of neurotechnology in criminal justice settings.

Human rights officials said the document was an important step toward raising global awareness of the issue and that it could help countries develop laws to prevent the abuse of such technology.

The report, some rights activists said, broadens the traditional understanding of freedom of thought, which has largely focused on freedom of expression, to include keeping one’s innermost ideas private.

“It’s no longer just about the classical ways through which freedom of thought is evoked,” said Marcello Ienca, a professor of ethics and neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich.

The UN’s interest comes amid a growing global push to protect brain data. Chile in 2012 enshrined protections for brain activity in its constitution. And several states, including California, Colorado and Montana, have passed laws protecting neural data. Similar measures have been proposed in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

But while some countries are working to protect citizens’ neural data, others are already attempting to access it.

In India, the police have for two decades used a technology called Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature — or BEOS — to determine whether a suspect may have been involved in a crime.

The scientific basis for this technology, which reads brain waves, is scant. Results from BEOS tests are inadmissible as evidence in Indian courts, but the technology has been applied in hundreds of high-stakes cases, including those of murder, rape and terrorism.

BEOS has not been validated by the international scientific community. And a committee established by the Indian government to review BEOS concluded in 2008 that it was “sub-optimal.”

Threats are not confined to state apparatuses. Neurotechnologies are increasingly entering the commercial marketplace through consumer wearable gadgets designed to monitor stress, sleep, and focus. Yet these devices operate with minimal regulation. The Neurorights Foundation analysed privacy policies of 30 consumer neurotech firms and found that most placed no limits on how customer brain data could be used.

While brain-computer interfaces offer genuine medical breakthroughs — enabling paralysed patients to write, control robotic limbs, or play chess online — the absence of regulatory safeguards leaves individual privacy dangerously exposed.