Neurorights: Safeguarding Minds in Neurotech

• Neurorights are legal and ethical principles that protect mental privacy, integrity, and cognitive liberty in the era of neurotechnology.
• They address risks such as unauthorized neural data access, brain stimulation, and subconscious manipulation through emerging brain-computer interfaces.
• They motivate multidisciplinary governance responses by integrating regulatory measures, privacy-preserving analytics, and technical safeguards to secure brain data.

Neurorights are a set of emerging legal, ethical, and governance principles designed to safeguard fundamental entitlements related to the mind and brain in the era of neurotechnology, particularly brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) and large-scale brain data analytics. These concepts have crystallized due to rapid advances in AI-mediated neural decoding, the commoditization of neural data, and the projection of ubiquitous, bi-directional brain–Internet connectivity. The principal neurorights—mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty—now anchor multidisciplinary efforts to codify protections against unwanted neural access, manipulation, or commodification, motivating a spectrum of technical, regulatory, and governance responses across jurisdictions (Ligthart et al., 2023, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025, Ienca et al., 2021, Lesaja et al., 2020, Sempreboni et al., 2018).

1. Conceptual Foundations and Core Definitions

Neurorights are distinguished from general privacy or bodily integrity by their specific focus on neurocognitive processes and neural data. Ligthart et al. (Ligthart et al., 2023) articulate three “core neurorights”:

• Mental privacy: Protection against unauthorized access to or inference of an individual’s thoughts, feelings, or other mental states, aimed at preserving the incommunicability and informational sensitivity of first-person experience.
• Mental integrity: Immunity from unwanted or unwarranted interference with the mind, analogous to bodily integrity, extending to alterations via neuromodulation, stimulation, or coercive intervention—even where no anatomical injury occurs.
• Cognitive liberty: Mental self-determination, encompassing both the negative right to avoid nonconsensual cognitive intervention and the positive right to self-modify or enhance one’s mental processes via neurotools.

A “minimalist conceptual understanding” restricts each right to its core negative protective function: freedom from nonconsensual interference (integrity), freedom from unauthorized access (privacy), and freedom to alter or refuse alteration of one’s own mind (cognitive liberty) (Ligthart et al., 2023).

These rights conceptually overlap with, but are not reducible to, established human rights such as freedom of thought (UDHR Art. 18) and the right to privacy (UDHR Art. 12; ECHR Art. 8). Distinctions are increasingly relevant as AI‐powered BCIs and neurodata analytics render inner neural contents observable, inferable, and manipulable at scale (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).

2. Legal and Ethical Underpinnings

Neurorights are grounded in autonomy, self-ownership, and personal sovereignty. The philosophical rationale extends traditional bodily integrity to the neural domain: direct or inferred intervention in an individual’s neural processes without consent constitutes an assault on personhood (Ligthart et al., 2023). Nonmaleficence and genuine consent are central; the difficulty of achieving “living consent” amidst opaque, continuous neural data capture complicates traditional models of informed consent (Stopczynski et al., 2014).

Jurisdictional mapping reflects this interdisciplinary momentum. Mental integrity is recognized under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Art. 17), American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR Art. 5), and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR Art. 8(1)), while mental privacy is guarded through data-protection statutes (e.g., GDPR), and cognitive liberty is proposed as a needed extension to established freedom of thought (Ligthart et al., 2023).

The proliferation of international initiatives (UNESCO, Council of Europe, OECD) and Chile’s constitutional reform attempts signals the ongoing institutionalization of neurorights as legal categories distinct from existing privacy and medical data frameworks (Ienca et al., 2021, Ligthart et al., 2023).

3. Threat Models, Risks, and Neurotechnology Context

Modern and future neurotechnologies—ranging from portable EEG/fNIRS headsets through invasive micro-electrode arrays to bi-directional Brain–Internet links—exponentially increase the volume, granularity, and exploitability of brain data (Lesaja et al., 2020, Sempreboni et al., 2018, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025). The use of such data in “neurocapitalism”—defined as the commodification of proxies for neural states (not just location or purchase data, but beliefs, intentions, and emotions)—raises substantial neurorights risks (Lesaja et al., 2020).

Risks include:

• Thought eavesdropping and brainprint tracking: Intercepted brain signals reveal mental content and unique identifiers, threatening anonymity and mental privacy (Sempreboni et al., 2018).
• Subconscious manipulation and neural data exploitation: Foundation models can act on subconscious or preparatory signals, steering behavior and eroding cognitive liberty (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).
• Unauthorized brain stimulation: Malicious or misguided data-driven “writes” to the brain can alter mood, preference, or personality without consent, undermining both mental integrity and cognitive liberty (Lesaja et al., 2020, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).
• Automation of coercion and profiling: Detailed models enable black-box recategorization, service denial, or behavioral exclusion, fragmenting personal identity and amplifying discrimination (Lesaja et al., 2020).
• Feedback loops and autonomy erosion: Recursive ML pipelines create self-reinforcing psychometric constellations, deepening user dependence and reducing volitional control (Lesaja et al., 2020).

Sempreboni and Viganò (Sempreboni et al., 2018) formalize these challenges for the anticipated “Internet of Neurons,” introducing system and attacker models, and relating security property violations directly to breaches of neurorights.

4. Architecture, Formalization, and Technical Safeguards

Multiple technical paradigms address neuroright risks by modulating data flows, access, and inference potential.

• Personal neuroinformatics (e.g., openPDS + SBS2): Confine raw high‐dimensional EEG to user‐owned stores; only computed low‐dimensional features (“answers”) are shared, supporting consent-backed, audit-logged access (Stopczynski et al., 2014). The architecture advocates for:

| Component | Role | Key Safeguard | |----------------|------------------------|--------------------------------------| | Smartphone Brain Scanner | Raw data capture | Local buffering, upload to openPDS | | openPDS | Data store, Q–A engine | OAuth2 access control; audit trails | | Question–Answer modules | Feature extraction | Limits data leakage, granular consent|

• Fiduciary AI and Guardian Models: Modular “guardian” architectures interpose explicit fiduciary constraints—loyalty (user-welfare dominance), care (risk-limited optimization), and confidentiality (differential privacy)—on BCI-integrated foundation models. Formalized as:

$$C_{\rm loyalty}(x,a) = U_{user}(a \mid x)\;-\;U_{third}(a \mid x)\;\ge\;0.$$

and

$$\sup_{x,x'}\;\frac{P\bigl(o \mid x\bigr)}{P\bigl(o \mid x'\bigr)} \;\le\;e^{\varepsilon},$$

with additional hardware isolation, expert-aligned RLHF and IRL, adversarial red-teaming, and formal verification (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).

• Cryptographic operators and neural sandboxes: Encryption, authentication, and filtering primitives tailored to neural data transmission and decoding; speculation on “mental encryption” and overlay anonymity protocols to shield brainprints and context (Sempreboni et al., 2018).

Papers in this domain emphasize the necessity of combining technical and contractual control (e.g., “New Deal on Data” rights to possess, control, dispose (Stopczynski et al., 2014)) with living, revocable consent and transparency over inference risks (Stopczynski et al., 2014, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).

5. Governance Strategies, Regulatory Models, and Human Rights Integration

Governance approaches are multi-layered, encompassing binding regulation, ethics and soft law, responsible-innovation, and human-rights codification (Ienca et al., 2021). Comprehensive frameworks:

• Binding regulation: Elevate “brain data” to a special category under data-protection law, ensuring consent, purpose limitation, and robust enforcement; criminalize unauthorized neural access/targeting (Ienca et al., 2021).
• Ethics and soft law: Institutionalize meaningful, ongoing consent, data-use committees, and consumer codes of conduct for BCIs, with explicit eConsent covering data flows (Ienca et al., 2021).
• Responsible innovation: Mandate privacy-preserving analytics (homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, federated learning), bias audits, and “data minimization” (Ienca et al., 2021).
• Human rights: Advocate explicit recognition of mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty as categorized neurorights, both as standalone rights and refinements of established freedoms (Ligthart et al., 2023, Ienca et al., 2021).

Bhattacharjee et al. (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025) extend this with proposals for institutional (neuroethics boards, continuous audit), legal (expansion of sensitive data statutes), and international (treaties for “cognitive sovereignty”) oversight, arguing for high-risk AI classification and harmonization with the EU AI Act.

6. Future Directions, Open Challenges, and Research Avenues

Critical technical and normative challenges remain:

• Feature safety and inference risks: Urgent need for empirical studies delineating which computed features are “safe” for sharing; many combinations remain re-identifiable and may reveal sensitive traits (Stopczynski et al., 2014).
• Dynamic and individualized consent: Interactive, context-aware interfaces for moment-to-moment neural data authorization are needed to ensure “living consent” (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).
• Enforcement and operationalization: Mechanisms for demonstrating and redressing breaches of mental integrity, especially in closed-loop, adaptive systems, are largely undeveloped (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).
• Global harmonization versus regulatory arbitrage: Divergent national approaches risk uneven protections; cross-border data flows pose “cognitive sovereignty” tensions (Ienca et al., 2021, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).
• Positive dimensions (fair access): Economic and social rights, including fair access to beneficial neurotech, and prevention of neuro-digital divides, require specification and international action (Ienca et al., 2021).
• Technological standards: Formalization of brainwave–data translation, cryptographic protocols attuned to neural streams, and trustworthy hardware modularity for BCI infrastructures (Sempreboni et al., 2018, Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025).

A plausible implication is that, without such layered, interdisciplinary, and anticipatory strategies, the rapid trajectory of BCI and brain-AI integration risks entrenching unprecedented power asymmetries and enabling forms of “neurocapitalism” that threaten fundamental dimensions of personhood, autonomy, and freedom (Lesaja et al., 2020).

7. Synthesis and Comparative Table

The translation of neurorights into enforceable practice is now a major locus of scholarly and policy innovation. Common trajectories include standalone legal codification (e.g., Chile), adaptive interpretation of existing rights (ECHR, GDPR), and multi-level governance spanning technology, law, and ethics (Ligthart et al., 2023, Ienca et al., 2021).

Neuroright	Minimalist Definition	Domain(s) of Risk
Mental Privacy	Freedom from unauthorized neural data access	Neural eavesdropping, brainprint tracking, profiling
Mental Integrity	Freedom from nonconsensual neural interference	Unauthorized brain stimulation/manipulation, cognitive hacking
Cognitive Liberty	Freedom to alter or refuse alteration of mind	Subconscious nudges, behavioral steering, suppression

Integrated approaches—combining technical controls, fiduciary AI architectures, regulatory standards, and robust rights definition—are increasingly recognized as necessary for the sustainable and equitable evolution of neurotechnology (Bhattacharjee et al., 18 Jul 2025, Stopczynski et al., 2014, Ienca et al., 2021). The scope, implementation, and harmonization of these neurorights remain active areas for ongoing legal, philosophical, and technological research.