A new consumer privacy battle is underway as tech gadgets capture our brain waves
As consumer technology capturing brain data proliferates under the radar of medical device regulation, Colorado has changed its privacy act to include biology.
The question "What is a thought?" is no longer strictly a philosophical one. Like anything else measurable, our thoughts are subject to increasingly technical answers, with data captured by tracking brainwaves. That breakthrough also means the data is commodifiable, and captured brain data is already being bought and sold by companies in the wearable consumer technologies space, with few protections in place for users.
In response, Colorado recently passed a first-in-the-nation privacy act aimed at protecting these rights. The act falls under the existing "Colorado Consumer Protection Act," which aims to protect "the privacy of individuals' personal data by establishing certain requirements for entities that process personal data [and] includes additional protections for sensitive data."
The key language in the Colorado act is the expansion of the term "sensitive data" to include "biological data" — inclusive of numerous biological, genetic, biochemical, physiological, and neural properties.
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