Hello everyone, my name is Jameson Spivack and I'm a senior policy analyst at the fFuture of Privacy Forum. Today we'll talk to you about an emerging set of technologies that monitor, measure and modulate your brain and nervous system called neuro biology's. I also want to talk specifically about how these powerful new tools could be used, the how they might impact our privacy and safety, and how policymakers, scholars and advocates around the world are thinking about regulating them. So to start with our mirror technologies, neuro technologies refers to a range of devices that connect the human nervous system to computers, collected, analyzed nervous system data, and in some cases, even regulate body. While currently they're generally confined to lab and healthcare settings. There are technologies are increasingly being developed in the consumer market as well. You may have seen captivating headlines about computers being implanted into the brains of people who are paralyzed and giving them the ability to, to move or to speak or to control things with their mind. And these are really exciting use cases. In fact, treating we're alleviating some of the symptoms of neurological disorders like paralysis, or Parkinson's are some of the main motivations behind developing these technologies. But neuro technologies can also measure neural activity for the purposes of increasing productivity, improving sleep, alleviating stress, and other key bodily functions. When we talk about neural data or neurological data, we're not just talking about the brain. We're also talking about anything involving the brain, that spinal cord in the peripheral nervous system, which includes the peripheral nerves throughout the body. Your nervous system is responsible for sensing important changes in your environment, and transmitting electrical signals between the brain and parts of your body to respond to these changes. So for example, if you touch a hot stove, pain receptors in your skin will send a message to your brain that something isn't right, and the brain will send signals to the muscles in your hand, telling them to Grand dark technologies that measure of potentially control. The organs of the nervous system are thus dealing with very critical and potentially sensitive information about the body and its relationship to the world around it. Data about our bodies in general can potentially reveal some of our most private information, our health conditions, sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs, interests, personality, or the list goes on and on. But neural data in particular could provide insight into what bioethicists Muna Farahani calls the final frontier of human privacy, which is the mind, particularly when combined with AI and integrated into consumer products like wearables and smart devices neurotechnologies could pose a significant privacy risk. So protecting this data is key not only to maintaining our dignity, but also to preventing discriminatory or otherwise powerful uses, or decisions made on the basis of his sensitive data.
Given the sensitive nature of neuro technologies and neuro data, it's critical that people are protected from any risks that they might raise. So in the US neuro data generated and shared in the context of relationship between a healthcare provider and a patient will be covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act or hipbone. In the consumer market, though, where health and wellness technologies are growing in popularity, neuro data will be covered by privacy laws, to the extent that that neuro data is considered personal data, meaning that people in jurisdictions with privacy laws may have some baseline level of protection for this data. But is this enough? Should neuro data be subject to Haiti protections given its particular sensitivity? This is the approach that lawmakers in Colorado are currently taking. They've introduced a bill that would amend the Colorado Privacy Act and add neuro date neural data as well as biological data to the laws definition of sensitive data, which is regulated more strictly than merely personal data. And if passed, this would be the first regulation of its kind in the US. As of Friday, the bill has passed the House and notice that the Senate really quickly outside of the US Latin America has seen a surge of interest in protecting an emerging collection of alleged rates called neuro rates, which includes the right to mental privacy. In 2021, Chile became the first country to incorporate neurites into its constitution, requiring that any technological development affecting mental integrity should be explicitly authorized by law. Other countries in the region are following them Julius footsteps with for example, Mexico and Brazil, in particular introducing bills current in their current legislative sessions that protect people's neuro rates. Um, there's also legislative interest in Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay, in amending their constitution or data protection laws to protect your rights. So as technologies collect more data about our bodies and are able to make increasingly granular and sensitive inferences about us, policymakers will continue to seek ways to regulate the data and the companies that access it. So to get a sense of probably where the neuro technology regulations are heading, particularly in narrow privacy, look to the early movers in the space like Chile and Colorado to get a sense of how they might influence forthcoming regulations. Thank you for your time.
