InteraXon’s response to the widely reported brain-hacking story was carried exclusively by TechCrunch in September.
After scientists authored a study ‘On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces’, consumers expressed serious safety and privacy concerns over EEG headsets and associated gaming wears.
Our CEO Ariel Garten addresses these concerns here, debunking some myths, and proposing broader solutions for the future. One is self-regulation.
Why Regulation?
A centre regulating the usage of brainwave data can proactively and effectively help to mitigate and prevent future violations and threats to consumers in this space.
While new technology may raise fears among consumers, our mandate is to explain and to disclose all aspects of this technology. For an ethics body to monitor in the brainwave space, with obligation to issues such as data infrastructure and privacy, the responsibility of education needs to be shared by scientists, developers, researchers and the media.
What’s Next?
Our call for an international centre for brainwave ethics maintains that community cooperation, vigilance and alertness can effectively mitigate these risks. Researchers and developers create software and hardware countermeasures to potential security threats, and users inform themselves about how they can safely access their devices.
Privacy, transparency, legality, and brainwave data usage are key mandate points fundamental in our goal to build a centre for brainwave ethics. Through this body, we hope to advocate for international guideline of standard uses and applications of future brainwave-enabled technologies.
But no body of this nature is complete without responses from our consumers. We need to keep hearing from you on what matters to you in the brainwave space. Your responses to date have helped inform our vision, and your insight is tantamount to our future work.
In trust,
InteraXon’s ethics team
- Jayar, Dani, Sina, Tracy, Trevor, Ariel, and Gena
