Conference Agenda

Mental privacy is becoming an increasingly pressing ethical and legal concern as neurotechnological approaches to decoding and manipulating human brain activity advance. The notion of mental privacy emphasizes the importance of safeguarding personal thoughts, emotions, and mental states from potential intrusion via brain-computer interfaces, neuromarketing tools, neuroenhancement, and other mindreading devices. The misuse of sensitive brain data and AI-driven profiling of mental states pose significant privacy risks. Additional challenges include defining consent requirements and coping with uncertainties about potential future inferences from mental data.

In recent discussions, mental privacy is usually framed as a novel kind of neuroright (Ienca & Andorno 2017; Ienca 2021; Ligthart et al. 2023) closely tied to personal identity and autonomy. However, there is considerable debate and conceptual ambiguity regarding the conceptions of “privacy” and “the mental” underpinning this proclaimed right. It is controversial whether the right to mental privacy represents a substantive addition to existing privacy frameworks or merely rearticulates established concerns. Critics argue that mental privacy rights either significantly overlap with or reduce to familiar privacy concerns upon closer inspection (Bublitz 2024; Susser & Cabrera 2023). Proponents of mental privacy rights emphasize the distinctive character of mental privacy problems and call for more context-sensitive and differentiated anticipatory analyses of potential developments in neurotechnology in various domains such as healthcare, marketing, and criminal justice. (Groot, Tesink & Meynen 2024)

This paper examines the conceptual foundations of mental privacy to assess whether it represents a substantial normative shift in privacy discourse. Specifically, it investigates whether the inclusion of the “mental” extends traditional boundaries of privacy debates. In the talk, we will briefly discuss some competing assumptions concerning the mental in the research literature, paying special consideration to extended mind theories and their implications. (Clowes, Smart & Heersmink 2024) Our analysis reveals that mental privacy encompasses a diverse range of phenomena, from beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to cultural factors, personal preferences, and political opinions, raising critical questions about how the boundaries between the “inner” and “outer” aspects of mental life are to be defined and protected.

References:

Bublitz, C. (2024). Neurotechnologies and human rights: restating and reaffirming the multi-layered protection of the person. The International Journal of Human Rights, 28(5), 782-807.

Clowes, Robert William ; Smart, Paul R. & Heersmink, Richard (2024). The ethics of the extended mind: Mental privacy, manipulation and agency. In Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs, Birgit Beck & Orsolya Friedrich (eds.), Neuro-ProsthEthics: Ethical Implications of Applied Situated Cognition. Berlin, Germany: J. B. Metzler. pp. 13–35.

Groot, N.; Tesink, V; Meynen, G. (2024): Nissenbaum and Neurorights: The Jury is Still Out, AJOB Neuroscience, 15:2, 136-138, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2024.2326967

Ienca, M. (2021): On Neurorights. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 15:701258. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.701258.

Ienca, M.; Andorno, R. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life sciences, society and policy, 13, 1-27.

Ligthart, S; Ienca, M; Meynen, G., et al. (2023): Minding Rights. Mapping Ethical and Legal Foundations of ‘Neurorights.’ Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 32(4):461-481. doi:10.1017/S0963180123000245.

Susser, D.; Cabrera, L. (2023): Brain Data in Context:

Are New Rights the Way to Mental and Brain Privacy?, AJOB Neuroscience, doi:10.1080/21507740.2023.2188275.

Privacy talk is full of metaphors about security. We worry about privacy “threats,” “attacks,” “violations,” and “invasions.” We want to “control access” to personal information. We develop tools for preventing privacy “leaks” and “breaches.” In Europe, information privacy is cast as “data protection.” Is privacy just security by another name?

No. But in this paper, I trace the use of security metaphors—security thinking—in theoretical discussions about privacy, in privacy law and policy, and (most recently) in privacy engineering, and I argue that this slippage between privacy and security is a problem for all three. In theoretical and philosophical discussions about privacy, security thinking entered the picture by way of worries about incursions into the “private sphere”—the home, the bedroom, the doctor’s office. In law and policy, security found its way in when normative defenses of the “right to be let alone” were operationalized in terms of control over personal information (i.e., access controls). In privacy engineering, the development of modern privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as differential privacy, were—from the very beginning—explicitly motivated by efforts to press tools and strategies from cryptography and computer security into the service of information privacy.

Security can bolster privacy—and vice versa—but they are distinct concepts that articulate different (if overlapping) sets of normative goals. While privacy resists straightforward definition, it names our aspiration to create social, political, and informational conditions in which individuals can develop and exercise autonomy, interpersonal relationships can flourish, and different visions of the good life can coexist. It is a fundamentally relational concept, concerned with the way people interact with and experience one another. Security, by contrast, aims at safety—protection from harm or the risk of harm. It can be understood relationally but it need not be; it is perfectly sensible to speak about securing oneself against harm from wild animals or an incoming storm.

The increasing dominance of security-related ideas in discussions about privacy has created several interlocking problems. First, insofar as privacy involves creating boundaries (spatial boundaries, decisional boundaries, epistemic boundaries, and so on), security thinking has encouraged privacy advocates to treat such boundaries as hard borders that require policing, rather than flexible interfaces that require negotiation, respect, and care. Second, because today security is often enacted by measuring and mitigating risk, thinking about privacy in terms of security has meant conceptualizing privacy as a form of risk management. Third, as security aims to prevent harm, when privacy is understood through the lens of security it’s assumed that violating someone’s privacy necessarily entails harming them (and that the absence of harm means the absence of violation), rather than abridging their rights.

Understanding privacy and security together is not all bad—each can meaningfully promote the other. But unless we carefully disambiguate them, the more privacy will be cast in the mold of security, and privacy's distinctive aims will fade from view.