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By Ian Stevens Ian is a 4th year undergraduate student at Northern Arizona University. He is majoring in Biomedical Sciences with minors in Psychological Sciences and Philosophy to pursue interdisciplinary research on how medicine, neuroscience, and philosophy connect.  Introduction Brain recording technologies (BRTs), such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that collect various types of brain signals from on and around the brain could be creating privacy vulnerabilities in their users. 1,2 These privacy concerns have been discussed in the marketplace as BCIs move from medical and research uses to novel consumer purposes. 3,4  Privacy concerns are grounded in the fact that brain signals can currently be decoded to interpret mental states such as emotions, 5 moral attitudes, 6 and intentions. 7 However, what can be interpreted from these brain signals in the future is ambiguous. The current uncertainty that surrounds future capacities to decode complex mental states – and ...

By Jessie Ginsberg Jessie Ginsberg is a second year student in the Master of Arts in Bioethics program and a third year law student at Emory University.  A father stood at the door of his local Minneapolis Target, fuming, and demanding to speak to the store manager. Holding coupons for maternity clothes and nursing furniture in front of the manager, the father exclaimed, “My daughter got this in the mail! She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” Target was not trying to get her pregnant. Unbeknownst to the father, his daughter was due in August.   In his February 16, 2012 New York Times article entitled, “ How Companies Learn Your Secrets ,” Charles Duhigg reported on this Minneapolis father and daughter and how companies like Target use marketing analytics teams to develop algorithms to anticipate consumers’ current and future needs. Accumulating data from prior purc...

By Marcello Ienca Marcello Ienca, M.Sc., M.A., is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics , University of Basel, Switzerland. His current projects include the assessment of intelligent assistive technologies for people with dementia and other neurocognitive disabilities, the regulation of pervasive neurotechnology, and the neurosecurity of human-machine interfaces. He is the chair of the Student/Postdoc Committee of the International Neuroethics Society and the current coordinator of the Swiss Network for Neuroscience, Ethics and Law. Technology is rapidly reshaping the world we live in. In the past few decades, mankind has not significantly changed biologically, but human societies have undergone continuous and unprecedented developments through technological innovation. Today, most human activities—from messaging to geolocation, from financial transactions to medical therapies— are computer-mediated. In the next decades, the quantity and variet...

Ethical issues with Lumosity and other Direct-to-Consumer Brain Training Games by Emory Neuroethics Program Director and AJOB Neuroscience Editor-in-Residence, Dr. Karen Rommelfanger and AJOB Neuroscience editorial intern Ryan Purcell. Article is open access here for the next 50 days until June 11, 2015. "Internet brain training programs, where consumers serve as both subjects and funders of the research, represent the closest engagement many individuals have with neuroscience. Safeguards are needed to protect participants’ privacy and the evolving scientific enterprise of big data."