In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.
We’re heading in that direction. Brainwave-tracking is becoming increasingly common in the consumer market, with the gaming industry at the forefront of the trend. “Neurogames” use brain-computer interfaces and electroencephalographic (EEG) gadgets like the Emotiv headset to read brain signals and map them to in-game actions, basically giving the player virtual psychic superpowers.
Now there’s a fear that we’re not doing enough to protect our raw thoughts from being hacked with “brain spyware” or tracked and gathered like the rest of our personal data. The concern was raised last month at the 2014 Neurogaming Conference in San Francisco, NPR reported.
“We may wake up in a few years and say, ‘Oh, we should have done something. We should have thought about the privacy of this data,’” Arek Stopczynski, a neuroinformatics researcher at MIT told me in an interview.
It’s possible to glean private information like PIN numbers, credit cards, addresses, and birthdays “leaked” from brain signals.
EEG data is extremely rich, or “high-dimensional,” meaning a single signal can reveal a lot of information about you: if you have a mental illness, are prone to addiction, your emotions, mood, and taste.
Raw brainwave data uploaded to a server for the gaming purposes could also be tapped to get a detailed read-out of your psyche. It’s possible to glean private information like PIN numbers, credit cards, addresses, and birthdays “leaked” from brain signals, as researchers demonstrated in a 2013 paper on the privacy and security implications of brain-controlled consumer products.
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