Your Brain Waves Are Up for Sale. A New Law Wants to Change That.
The New York Times
In a first, a Colorado law extends privacy rights to the neural data increasingly coveted by technology companies.
Consumers have grown accustomed to the prospect that their personal data, such as email addresses, social contacts, browsing history and genetic ancestry, are being collected and often resold by the apps and the digital services they use.
With the advent of consumer neurotechnologies, the data being collected is becoming ever more intimate. One headband serves as a personal meditation coach by monitoring the user’s brain activity. Another purports to help treat anxiety and symptoms of depression. Another reads and interprets brain signals while the user scrolls through dating apps, presumably to provide better matches. (“‘Listen to your heart’ is not enough,” the manufacturer says on its website.)
The companies behind such technologies have access to the records of the users’ brain activity — the electrical signals underlying our thoughts, feelings and intentions.
On Wednesday, Governor Jared Polis of Colorado signed a bill that, for the first time in the United States, tries to ensure that such data remains truly private. The new law, which passed by a 61-to-1 vote in the Colorado House and a 34-to-0 vote in the Senate, expands the definition of “sensitive data” in the state’s current personal privacy law to include biological and “neural data” generated by the brain, the spinal cord and the network of nerves that relays messages throughout the body.
“Everything that we are is within our mind,” said Jared Genser, general counsel and co-founder of the Neurorights Foundation, a science group that advocated the bill’s passage. “What we think and feel, and the ability to decode that from the human brain, couldn’t be any more intrusive or personal to us.”
“We are really excited to have an actual bill signed into law that will protect people’s biological and neurological data,” said Representative Cathy Kipp, Democrat of Colorado, who introduced the bill.
New findings suggest that an extraordinarily powerful and dangerous burst of radiation might flare from our sun in the future.
Anchored by juicy braised duck and finished with an unforgettable family-size crème brûlée, this menu from Clare de Boer will have everyone talking.
The shower forms from the debris of an asteroid and peaks this weekend. But a nearly full moon could interfere with viewing.
The opposing paths taken by two powerful firms — Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz — embody a profound debate about the future of an industry that funds and fosters American innovation.
Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Scientists are concerned that the H5N1 virus could set off another human pandemic. But it is already putting species under pressure in the wild.
The scarcity and fragility of rare old bottles makes them naturally memorable, but these 12 younger wines had their own unforgettable charms.
DNA from European fossils dating back 45,000 years offers new clues to how our species spread across the world.
An intense struggle has unfolded in Washington between companies and officials over where to draw the line on selling technology to China.
There’s a universal — and easy — answer to a common kitchen predicament.
More adolescents than ever are watching it. What’s needed, researchers say, are frank conversations and “porn literacy.”