h/t to Lifeboat’s April 7, 2026 blog posting “Your brain for sale? The new frontier of neural data” pointing to this April 7, 2026 essay by Alberto Rinaldi (Senior Lecturer in Law and AI, Department of Law, Lund University) and Johan Mårtensson (Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology, Lund University) on The Conversation,
Your browsing history, your location, your political preferences. For years, tech companies have found ways to turn personal data into profit. Now, a new and far more intimate frontier is opening: the electrical signals produced by your brain.
This is not science fiction. Nor is it about brain implants for paralysed patients or experimental medical procedures. A fast-growing consumer market of non-invasive neurotechnology – wearable headsets, brain activity-reading headbands, focus-enhancing devices – is already here, already being sold and already collecting neural data from ordinary users. But the legal and ethical frameworks to govern it are struggling to keep up.
A landmark case from Chile shows why this matters.
In August 2023, Chile’s Supreme Court issued the world’s first ruling on commercial neurodata. The case involved Senator Guido Girardi and Emotiv Inc, a San Francisco company selling the Insight wireless headset – a consumer device marketed for focus, meditation and cognitive performance.
When Girardi began using it, he discovered that accepting the terms of service meant granting Emotiv a worldwide, irrevocable and perpetual licence over his brain data. Unless he paid for a premium account, that data would be stored in Emotiv’s cloud with no way for him to access or export his own neural records.
The Chilean Supreme Court ruled that Emotiv had violated Girardi’s constitutional right to mental integrity, concluding: “The data obtained from Insight users … overlooks the preliminary requirement to have express consent for its use for scientific research purposes. Information collected for various purposes cannot be used differently without its owner’s knowledge and approval.”
The Supreme Court ordered the company to delete Girardi’s data immediately and prohibited sale of the Insight device in Chile until its privacy policies were revised. The headsets remain on sale in other countries around the world.
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A market growing faster than its rules
Emotiv is far from alone. Companies such as Muse (marketed for meditation and sleep) and Neurosity (aimed at software developers seeking focus) [emphases mine] have built a consumer neurotechnology sector that is projected to double in value to more than US$55 billion (£42 billion) within a decade. It is attracting investment from some of the world’s wealthiest technology figures.
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The Emotiv case showed that, in one instance at least, a company had retained a user’s neural data for research purposes under anonymisation provisions, without that user having any meaningful awareness of what was being collected or why.
The stakes here are higher than with most forms of personal data. Neural signals are not like a credit card number that can be changed if compromised. Generated by your brain in real time, they can increasingly be used to infer things about you that you have not chosen to disclose – such as emotional responses, cognitive patterns, and other reactions you may not consciously be aware of.
Chile has showed that courts can act. Legislators in several jurisdictions are beginning to follow. The harder question is whether the frameworks being built are moving fast enough to match a market that, in the quest for competitive advantage, does not want to hang about waiting for them.
My April 2, 2026 posting “Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and music composition” highlighted a creative approach to using brain data and my April 22, 2026 posting “Dancer with a motor neuron(e) disease (MND) guides her digital avatar through a stage performance” feature positive aspect of working with brain data..While my October 21, 2025 posting “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs” provides a deeper dive into some of the thorny issues around intellectual property rights and the new technologies, including brain implants..
For anyone curious about Emotiv, there’s this seductive video,
You can find out more about MUSE (a Canadian company) here and about Neurosity here.
There are a couple of previous postings that feature MUSE,
- a December 5, 2012 posting “A brainwave computer controller named Muse”
- a March 6, 2015 posting “More about MUSE, a Canadian company and its brain sensing headband; women and startups; Canadianess”
That’s it.