Your thoughts are your own, right? Perhaps not. New technology is bringing that day closer when the unscrupulous may actually be able to hack human thoughts.
It raises a number of new ethical concerns for this brave new world we're entering with each rotation of the Earth.
Mind Reading
Bonaci’s research focuses on cyber security and privacy, especially in conjunction with biomedical devices. The information that is used in her experiment to determine neural responses is gathered from a person’s electro-physical signals. After the Enigma conference, Bonaci told Ars Technica, “Electrical signals produced by our body might contain sensitive information about us that we might not be willing to share with the world. On top of that, we may be giving that information away without even being aware of it.”
The Future
While this technology isn’t yet capable of complete mind reading, Bonaci is sure that if combined with virtual reality (VR) headset technology, fitness apps that use physical devices, modified BCI equipment, or other combinations of software and hardware, this technology could ultimately allow researchers to retrieve a much wider variety of sensitive elecric signals from humans. As biomedical technology and methods for bringing us closer to our electronics continue to develop and improve, Bonaci’s experiment will become increasingly more relevant. And while there is no current need to panic about having our minds read without our consent or knowledge, there is a very real future possibility of ethical concerns surrounding this technology. We will one day have to think of the electrical signals that we produce biologically as data that could be stolen, manipulated, or used against us.
via Futurismo