By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Most Intimate Data You Never Consented to Share

Here’s a scenario that should terrify you: you’re wearing your fitness watch, scrolling through social media on your phone, maybe using VR goggles for a quick gaming session. Nothing unusual. Except every one of those devices is quietly collecting data about your brain activity, emotional state, stress levels, attention patterns, and cognitive load. And you have no idea it’s happening.

Welcome to the neural data revolution — the next frontier in privacy invasion that makes Facebook’s data collection look quaint by comparison.

We’re not talking about distant science fiction. Major tech companies are already embedding neural sensors into everyday devices. Meta’s AI glasses use electromyography sensors. Apple’s Vision Pro integrates eye-tracking with biometric sensors. Apple has patented EEG-enabled AirPods. Your smartwatch monitors heart rate variability that reveals your emotional states. Your fitness tracker knows when you’re stressed before you do.

The neurotechnology market is exploding — from $9.8 billion in 2022 to a projected $17.1 billion in 2026. Over one in five Americans already wear devices that continuously monitor physiological signals that can infer mental states. And almost none of them understand what they’ve consented to.

Why Neural Data Changes Everything

For the past two decades, privacy debates have centered on what we actively share — our browsing history, location data, purchase behavior, social connections. We could at least theoretically control these data streams. Don’t want Facebook to know something? Don’t post it. Don’t want Google tracking your location? Turn it off.

Neural data destroys that illusion of control.

Your brain betrays you constantly. Heart rate variability indicates stress and emotional states without your conscious awareness. Eye-tracking reveals attention, cognitive load, and correlates with personality traits. Muscle activation patterns expose intentions before you act on them. Your nervous system is a continuous broadcast of your inner life, and the sensors to capture it are becoming ubiquitous.

This isn’t theoretical speculation. Research demonstrates that biometric data from wearables and XR devices can reliably infer mental states, cognitive patterns, emotional responses, and even neurological conditions. The technology to decode your thoughts isn’t coming — it’s already deployed in consumer products you’re wearing right now.

What makes this uniquely dangerous is that neural data is:

Continuous — Your brain doesn’t take breaks. Neural signals flow constantly, creating an uninterrupted stream of deeply personal information.

Involuntary — You cannot choose to stop your heart rate from varying or your pupils from dilating. Unlike typed text or clicked links, neural signals happen automatically.

Unconscious — Most neural data reflects processes you’re not aware of and can’t control. Your cognitive load, emotional arousal, attention shifts — these happen below conscious thought.

Deeply revealing — Heart rate patterns don’t just show you’re exercising. They reveal anxiety, attraction, deception, interest, cognitive difficulty, emotional valence. Eye movements don’t just track vision — they expose what captures attention, triggers arousal, causes confusion, maintains engagement.

In short: neural data is the closest thing to mind-reading technology that currently exists. And it’s being collected by consumer devices designed to look like fashion accessories and productivity tools.

The Regulatory Scramble Has Begun

To their credit, some policymakers recognize the threat. California, Colorado, and Montana have added neural data as a category of sensitive personal information requiring heightened protection. Peru and Chile have gone further, legally defining neurodata as sensitive personal data requiring the highest-level safeguards — establishing precedent for AI-neural interface governance.

The proposed federal MIND Act (Management of Individuals’ Neural Data Act) would direct the FTC to study neural data collection, identify regulatory gaps, and recommend protections. It defines neural data extraordinarily broadly — encompassing not just direct brain measurements but any physiological data that could reveal “cognitive, emotional, or psychological states or neurological conditions.”

That definition matters. It acknowledges what neuroscientists already know: you don’t need a brain implant or EEG headset to access neural information. Wearables, smartphones, VR headsets, smart glasses — all collect data from the peripheral nervous system that reveals mental states. The sensors are already everywhere.

But legislation is moving slowly while technology deployment accelerates. The global extended reality market grew from $54.58 billion in 2024 to a projected $100.77 billion by 2026. Fitness wearables expanded from $62.03 billion to a projected $290.85 billion by 2032. Millions of people are using neural-data-collecting devices right now, mostly without understanding what’s being measured, how it’s being used, or who has access.

What Companies Are Actually Doing With Your Neural Data

The honest answer? We mostly don’t know. That’s the problem.

Neural data enables unprecedented targeting and manipulation. Advertisers can measure exact moment when your attention wanes, when something triggers emotional engagement, when cognitive load suggests confusion or interest. They can optimize content in real-time based on your involuntary neural responses.

Game designers can measure precisely what creates flow states, what generates frustration, what triggers compulsion. They can tune experiences to maximize addictiveness based on your unique neural signatures.

Employers could potentially monitor cognitive load, attention levels, stress responses during work. Insurance companies could assess neurological risk factors. Law enforcement is already experimenting with neural data for identification and lie detection.

Most concerningly, this data reveals patterns you’re not aware of — susceptibilities to manipulation, hidden biases, unconscious preferences, early markers of neurological conditions. Information that could be used to discriminate, exploit, or control.

The current regulatory framework is laughably inadequate. Most privacy laws were written for explicit data collection — information you knowingly provide. They weren’t designed for passive, continuous collection of involuntary biological signals that reveal your inner mental state.

Companies are exploiting this gap. They’re not required to explain what neural data they collect, how algorithms infer mental states from it, who purchases that information, or how it might be used against you. Most privacy policies don’t even mention neural data collection because most users don’t know to ask about it.

The Coming Battle Lines

The emerging debate splits along predictable but crucial fault lines.

Technology companies and innovators argue that neural data enables transformative benefits — better health monitoring, early disease detection, enhanced user experiences, breakthrough treatments for neurological conditions. They claim that overly restrictive regulation will stifle innovation and prevent beneficial applications from reaching people who need them.

They’re not entirely wrong. Brain-computer interfaces could restore mobility to paralyzed patients. Neural monitoring could detect Alzheimer’s early enough to intervene. Neurotechnology holds genuine promise.

Privacy advocates and ethicists counter that the risks are existential. Once companies can decode your thoughts, emotions, and mental states in real-time, the potential for manipulation becomes unlimited. This isn’t just targeted advertising — it’s targeted psychological intervention based on your most intimate, involuntary responses.

They point out that neural data reveals things about you that you don’t consciously know about yourself. That makes informed consent impossible. How can you consent to sharing information you don’t know you’re producing and don’t understand the implications of?

Both sides have legitimate points. But the debate is largely happening in academic journals and policy circles while most people remain completely unaware that their devices are already collecting neural data.

What Makes This Crisis Different

We’ve been through privacy panics before. Social media data harvesting. Location tracking. Facial recognition. Each time, some people adjusted their behavior, regulations eventually caught up (partially), and life continued.

Neural data is different in three critical ways.

First, the asymmetry of awareness. Most people have at least vague awareness that Facebook sells advertising based on their behavior or that Google tracks their location. Almost nobody realizes their smartwatch is inferring their emotional states or that their VR headset measures their cognitive load and attention patterns. The collection is invisible, the implications are poorly understood, and the consent is essentially fictional.

Second, the impossibility of opting out. You can delete Facebook, turn off location tracking, avoid cameras. But neural data collection is becoming embedded in essential devices. Your employer might require you to wear safety equipment with neural sensors. Your insurance company might offer discounts for health monitoring that includes neural data. Your school might use educational technology that tracks student attention and engagement through neural proxies.

Opting out increasingly means opting out of participation in modern life. That’s not a meaningful choice.

Third, the potential for manipulation at scale. Previous privacy violations exposed information about you. Neural data creates pathways to change you. Once platforms can measure your exact psychological responses in real-time, they can optimize every interaction to maximize whatever metric they choose — engagement, emotional response, purchasing intent, political alignment, behavioral change.

This isn’t hypothetical. Social media platforms already use A/B testing to optimize engagement. Now imagine they can measure your precise emotional and cognitive responses to each variant and update the algorithm in real-time based on your unique neural patterns. The potential for exploitation is unlimited.

The Window for Action Is Narrow

Here’s what makes this particularly urgent: once the infrastructure is deployed and normalized, changing course becomes exponentially harder.

Right now, neural data collection is expanding rapidly but hasn’t yet become ubiquitous. There’s still a window to establish strong protections before every device we interact with routinely captures and analyzes our mental states.

That window is closing fast. In five years, neural data collection might be so thoroughly embedded in consumer technology that regulating it feels impossible without disrupting industries and inconveniencing billions of people. At that point, we’ll have normalized mind-reading technology without ever having a serious public conversation about whether we wanted it.

The path forward requires several parallel efforts:

Regulatory clarity — Neural data needs its own category of protection, not squeezed awkwardly into existing biometric or health data frameworks. The consent standards need to be elevated. Companies should be required to explain in plain language what neural data they collect and what inferences they draw from it.

Technical safeguards — Processing neural data locally on devices rather than sending it to cloud servers. Strict data minimization — collect only what’s necessary and delete it quickly. Edge computing and homomorphic encryption to enable useful applications without exposing raw neural data.

Corporate responsibility — Companies deploying neural-sensing technology have an obligation to be transparent about collection, to provide meaningful control to users, and to demonstrate that safeguards actually prevent misuse. Self-regulation has failed repeatedly in tech. This requires enforceable standards with real penalties.

Public education — Most people don’t understand what neural data is, that they’re producing it constantly, or that companies are collecting and analyzing it. That has to change. A functioning democracy requires informed citizens, and you can’t be informed if you don’t know your thoughts are being harvested.

The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think

Privacy advocates sometimes get dismissed as alarmists worried about abstract harms. But the threat from neural data isn’t abstract.

Imagine an employer who can detect when you’re stressed, distracted, or considering quitting — not from what you say but from involuntary physiological signals your wearable captures. Imagine insurers who use neural data to identify people with elevated neurological risk and price them out of coverage. Imagine authoritarian governments using neural monitoring to detect dissent or nonconformity before it’s expressed in action.

Imagine living in a world where every device around you is constantly measuring your mental states, where algorithms know your emotional vulnerabilities better than you do, where psychological manipulation is optimized in real-time based on data you didn’t know you were producing.

That’s not dystopian speculation. That’s the trajectory we’re on right now. The technology exists. The economic incentives are powerful. The regulations are inadequate. The public is largely unaware.

We’re sleepwalking into a future where the privacy of thought — historically the most protected form of privacy, the foundation of individual autonomy and human dignity — becomes a historical curiosity.

The choice isn’t between innovation and privacy. It’s between thoughtful governance that enables beneficial applications while protecting fundamental rights, versus a free-for-all where mental privacy is sacrificed to whoever can deploy sensors fastest.

We have maybe five years to get this right. After that, the neural data infrastructure will be too embedded to meaningfully constrain without massive disruption.

The privacy crisis nobody sees coming is already here. The question is whether we’ll recognize it in time to do something about it.

Related Articles:

When AI Can Read Minds: The Coming Battle Over Thought Privacy

The Surveillance Economy 2.0: How Wearables Became Psychological Tracking Devices

2030: The Year Mental Privacy Becomes Technically Impossible