Wearable makers are harvesting brain data to train AI without telling users
Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy
A Science report on consumer brain-wave headsets reveals that device makers are quietly collecting neural data to train AI models, often without users' knowledge. Hacker News commenters note the article's original headline was "The scramble for your brain data," and one points to a 2012 USENIX paper on side-channel attacks using brain-computer interfaces, arguing the capability has only grown since.
Reading someone's mind is just the beginning, that paper was 14 years ago, and they've likely advanced far beyond it.
- frereubu
This area of ethics should be considered seriously, but in this specific instance these consumer-level headsets tell you very little about anything. I'm constantly frustrated by the amount of coverage these get when, if you've ever studied any kind of neuroscience, you realise quite how vague the data is, and how much over-interpretation goes on in the advertising for these products.
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...
- nashashmi
Blame the lawyers who wrote infinitely extensive “complete and comprehensive” permission agreements for the end user. Then blame the unethical ceos and shareholder-driven companies for exploiting such permissions.
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 Big large govt agencies negotiate TOS’s and hold the companies to those outdated TOS’s so the companies understand well that they cant just unilaterally change it and must maintain older processes that respect legacy TOS’s.
- gabriel666smith
Huh, interesting. The company has amassed 50k hours of training data - that’s a very large dataset.
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.
- adrianN
Every day my urge to just disconnect from modern society becomes stronger, but alas it is impossible to live outside of it when you have a family.
- Kiboneu
"On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces" (Martinovic et al. 2012)
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...