Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy
science.org
science.org
Now we are in a situation that anyone can do anything with any data. And this was not what we were thinking. There needs to be a legal reset.
A new judicial ruling that forbids such permissions as its terms of service. That calls such permissions exploitation. That labels them as a force of evil (like the patents meant to favor edison’s movie cartels) and invalidates all powers they hold. And a judicial ruling that unilaterally limits all prior TOS agreements to be for just specific existing uses. And all future TOS’s to be opt-in, versus being forced to accept or withhold service.
If I subscribe to Google, and Google changes its TOS, why the hell should I accept a new TOS just to get access to my data? Big large govt agencies negotiate TOS’s and hold the companies to those outdated TOS’s so the companies understand well that they cant just unilaterally change it and must maintain older processes that respect legacy TOS’s.
so any party that binds another in such an agreement is knowingly acting in bad faith
The bigger problem is that’s also exactly how the government works: I never opted into any of the laws to which I am subjected, and I have zero bargaining power. The entire premise of our civilization is effectively based on such bad faith. Good faith would be more akin to referendums rhat give the public the chance to affirm or strike any or all existing laws on the books.
Which is why I now endorse violent revolution. Reform is not a realistic option. Those in power demonstrate every single day the kind of bad faith that deserves a firing squad. I would rather endure the terror of anarchy than suffer this tyranny for much longer. Things are not going to get better any other way.
If people don't analyze in detail what the politicians that they vote plan to do, why would they act wisely at referendums? Depending on how a certain idea is framed by the media, the same idea may be seen as good or bad. And it's not possible to make a referendum for every one of the thousands of laws we have. The democracy with representatives was created in part because of practical reasons regarding the labor of studying the laws.
Instead, I want to see local governments become the first-class line of order. County/provincial/regional government would be nothing more than an emergent property of local governments banding together, pooling resources from the bottom up. The current top-down model of federal taxation and trickle-down funding is completely backwards.
Anarchy is a necessary part of the transition, because the existing power structures or not going to peaceably dismantle themselves and transfer power to “lesser” powers that previously would have been groveling at their feet for scraps.
perhaps a rebranding is necessary
how about... Freedom Prime. Super Freedom. Hyperliberty
I may be mistaken, but I don't see any reason for that situation to happen. We humans started with groups, then they organized as tribes, then as regional governments, and then national states. And the bigger entities had power to assimilate either by force or by diplomacy smaller entities. Why would it occur differently this time?
maybe the final form is one giant super-state, made up of smaller nation-states, itself containing multiple city-states, surrounded and cooperating with neighboring estates
League of Nations -> UN -> ???
the balance seemed to lie with the body of the citizen of the state: if someone didnt agree with their leader/laws, they simply laid down their arms when a benevolent invader / reformer arrives
it doesn't have to be violent
if that's how existing powers maintain control, then the new status quo _cannot_ be violent
otherwise it would just be another participant in the existing power struggle
it seems impossible because it hasn't happened, but that doesnt mean it cant necessarily. we discover new things about our selves every day :)
I learned something like this in business school. It didn’t seem like it corresponded to the world I knew and if it was ever true it doesn’t seem to be so today.
What are you even talking about? Contract law assumes no such thing and unequal parties have been signing contracts for literally hundreds of years.
It's a shame this book by my MSc dissertation supervisor isn't coming out until next June, because I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff in there about this kind of neurobollocks: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/479845/neurobollocks-by-devl...
Do you think that this data is so vague that it is 100% unlikely to provide utility? 99.9%?
"Muscle movements on the head (like moving your eyes, smiling, gurning, etc) produce electrical noise that is far stronger than the brain signals EEG tries to measure. You cannot put a helmet over an EEG kit and then bang your head around in a jet or race car and get anything but pure noise."
That's a crude example, but it's the kind of over-interpretation that's really common with these things.
And that's using a proper EEG skullcap, not these ridiculously simple things that you slip over your head without any conduction gel etc. In my non-expert opinion a large dataset of this kind of vague data would just lead to mostly mush because the signals that come from these things are so rubbish. But it won't stop people who want to make money from it that there are clear signals there, like the use of Myers-Briggs, astrology etc.
The only current technology that actively concerns me is direct neural implantation. You can get really clean, clear signals from that depending on where you hook into. Anything else feels like it's a long way away from anything which would actively harm privacy, although clearly people have a vested interest in making that work and we shouldn't be complacent.
As is I can imagine this being used to interrogate people. Of course it doesn’t matter if the EEG produces any real data.
Billy only needs to think LEOs can read his mind.
Yes, absolutely.
> As is I can imagine this being used to interrogate people. Of course it doesn’t matter if the EEG produces any real data.
Indeed - "lie detectors" are a good analogy.
I blame engineers here. I have a neuroscience background myself and know what you're talking about. Engineers, in my experience, can't really grasp the nature of neural signals and do seem to over-interpret them quite alot or just misuse them.
Revealed preference.
>But although EEG might not read people’s thoughts, “it would be equally misleading to suggest that it cannot reveal meaningful information about their cognitive states,” says Pietro Aricò, professor of bioengineering at the Sapienza University of Rome. And as consumer EEG devices begin to incorporate AI and are able to conduct increasingly sophisticated analyses, data collected on the outer surface of the brain could be enough to decode intimate features of our mental lives, including our thoughts, emotions, and personality, says Rafael Yuste, co-founder of the Neurorights Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting people’s brain data rights.
I wonder what these features are.
The only way to stop this debasement of humanity is to destroy the tools that store this data. Time for everyone to start carrying portable emp devices and performing 'random acts of privacy preservation'.
Then in the past couple decades—a generation—we have put our faith into new ways of communicating, with many convenient individual decisions that undermine our traditional social context, eg. giving away our contacts, recording everywhere, and reporting our locations, with simple personal benefits and large effects (multitrillion dollar effects are substantial). Our institutional trust is plainly naive to graph theory.
Unsure how to curve fit the two.
A side-project of mine recently has been building out this stack:
- Recording audio in proximity to me, and transcribing it
- Grabbing EEG data from cheap sensors on my own head
- Mapping it against the transcription
With a view to eventually train transformer models which might reliably understand, from EEG signals, what words I am thinking. The existing studies on this method don’t seem to show any drop off in efficacy at mind-reading (lol) as the dataset gets larger.
(If anyone wants to invest some seed money so I can justify spending more time strapping things to my head, do hit me up.)
Crucially, the Muse headband the article talks about doesn’t have a microphone. This seems (slightly!) better for user privacy, but it seems like it would hamper training somewhat, depending on your aims.
A less privacy-respecting company in this space with a popular wellness device could do some pretty dark stuff - it doesn’t really bear thinking about. A sleep tracker app with companion EEG sensor device, for example, could reasonably request microphone access without most users batting an eye.
>Are you a person who feels bloodflow/tension in brain parts
What you're feeling is muscle tension tighten and release in your head/face/neck/scalp, which does effect blood flow.
But there are nerve endings all around the scalp, everywhere in the face and neck, ears, that organ that picks up sound, eye nerves? So some hypersensitivity might create some cerebral geolocationish triangulation of where vessels dilate and constrict? Or are blocked by clots, which gives the flow and dilation a different shape and timing, which also changes clock sync of what usually fires together at much more specific rates than during the blockade.
I'm asking. I'm curious and have not done a preliminary consultation with AI, yet ( why do I feel the need to say this? Probably the sustained increased oxygen supply. Lot's of additional neurogenesis going on in my head atm--19 months on nose plasters )
I used to have annoying TLE attacks which changed thinking patterns and nudged inner dialogues in and out of conversations with people. Even when I was super smooth after weeks of continuous stretching and mobility exercises ( hold two minutes, don't be a noob ) ... but that's about the only somewhat relatable example which I mentioned elsewhere some time in the past. Oh, I felt the TLE like I felt pinching or stuffed sinuses or swallowing unchewed chunks of food for the duration of the TLE.
Some people report tensions on the inside of their forehead even though the particular and surrounding facial nerves are quantifyably ( there's probably a correct term for that ) chill, when taking certain medications.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65499-0
If you know that at [timestamp] a certain word was audible in my vicinity, it might be reasonably safe to guess that I also thought this word around that point, because I heard that word.
The EEG signal my brain creates might behave in a unique way when I heard (and thus, thought) that word. Over time, it might be possible, using machine learning, to notice that unique pattern repeatedly in the data an EEG sensor captures.
So my hope is that decoding EEG might be perhaps simpler than people currently assume. Most studies create their datasets using "lots of participants, participating for relatively short periods" rather than "one participant, over an extremely long period".
If it's possible to have my EEG reasonably-well mapped and decoded (this signal previously repeatedly meant I was hearing the words "uuuh me so horny", to use your example) it might then become possible to read mapped words in the EEG signals even when the mapped words were not audible.
This, in turn, might mean it was possible to read (some of) the words I am thinking.
As a sibling commenter pointed out, it's insanely noisy data, so I have no idea whether any of the above will ever prove possible.
But mapping assumptions in the manner you laid out isn't something I would have any idea how to do, not least because I often hate the sports teams I love when they are underperforming.
That's kind of the motivation for trying a no-MEG, (comparatively) large dataset, ML approach - it strikes me as exactly the kind of problem to which transformer models might be particularly well-suited, if it's even possible to find a hint of anything in that noise at all.
The continued development of technology will worsen the situation.
—Spicy Secret Santa
You know the nice thing about modern civilization? You're free to go build a shack in Montana and live on berries without modern medicine. If or when you need medical assistance it'll be a phone call away. Till then, enjoy your natural life, just don't mail anything.
Who's not willing to do it with you.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Peter Thiel and his ilk would use it to reprogram anyone who doesn't conform to there thinking. He even bragged about it before being indirectly called the antichrist in his interview with Ross Douthat.
Thiel organised a bolt hole down here in New Zealand and we really don’t want him.
If the start of an episode can be tracked (sub-second) perhaps there are some counter measures that can be taken to disrupt/subdue the electrical storm that sustains the episode. That detection pattern is something that is unique to the patient so there is custom learning involved. The hope is with enough samples we may be able to detect some hidden 'core' pattern - similar to warnings for earth quakes - and mitigate the episode or use that to go into a heightened sensitivity mode to watch out for the more custom signal.
Multiple attempts to contact any kind of support have gone unanswered, and according to Reddit the founders appear to have quietly disappeared, which pisses me off more than a little bit. This thing was not cheap.
I'm quite confident that other people are happily using theirs. It's just that mine doesn't work.
Companies should only be allowed to use people's data for a specific purpose that the customer has explicitly given consent to. No hidden terms in EULs and no using data for any purpose than what they have permission to do.