A wave of biological privacy laws may be coming as tech gadgets capture our brain waves
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The question “What is a thought?” is no longer strictly a philosophical one. Like anything else measurable, our thoughts are subject to increasingly technical answers, with data captured by tracking brainwaves. That breakthrough also means the data is commodifiable, and captured brain data is already being bought and sold by companies in the wearable consumer technologies space, with few protections in place for users.
In response, Colorado recently passed a first-in-the-nation privacy act aimed at protecting these rights. The act falls under the existing “Colorado Consumer Protection Act,” which aims to protect “the privacy of individuals’ personal data by establishing certain requirements for entities that process personal data [and] includes additional protections for sensitive data.”
The key language in the Colorado act is the expansion of the term “sensitive data” to include “biological data” — inclusive of numerous biological, genetic, biochemical, physiological, and neural properties.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is the most famous example of how technology is being embedded with the human mind, though it isn’t alone in the space, with Paradromics emerging as a close competitor, alongside devices that have returned speech to stroke victims and helped amputees move prosthetic limbs with their minds. All of these products are medical devices that require implantation, and are protected under HIPAA’s strict privacy requirements. The Colorado law is focused on the rapidly growing consumer technology sphere and devices that don’t require medical procedures, have no analogous protections, and can be bought and used without medical oversight of any kind.
There are dozens of companies making products that are wearable technologies capturing brain waves (aka neura data). On Amazon alone, there are pages of products, from sleep masks designed to optimize deep sleep or promote lucid dreaming, to headbands promising to promote focus, and biofeedback headsets that will take your meditation session to the next level. These products, by design and necessity, capture neural data through use of small electrodes that produce readings of brain activity, with some deploying electric impulses to impact brain activity.
The laws in place for the handling all of that brain data are virtually non-existent.
“We have entered the world of sci-fi here,” said lead sponsor of the Colorado bill, Representative Cathy Kipp. “As with any advances in science, there must be guardrails.”
‘ChatGPT-moment’ for consumer brain tech
A recent study by The NeuroRights Foundation found that of thirty companies examined who are making wearable technology that is capable of capturing brainwaves, twenty-nine “provide no meaningful limitations to this access.”
“This revolution in consumer neurotechnology has been centered on the increasing ability to capture and interpret brainwaves,” said Dr. Sean Pauzauskie, medical director at The NeuroRights Foundation. Devices using electroencephalography, a tech readily available to consumers, is “a multibillion-dollar market that is set to double over the next five or so years,” he said. “Over the next two to five years it is not implausible that neurotechnology might see a ChatGPT-moment.”
How much data can be collected depends upon several factors, but the technology is rapidly advancing, and could lead to an exponential increase in applications, with the tech increasingly incorporating AI. Apple has already filed patents for brain-sensing AirPods.
“Brain data are too important to be left unregulated. They reflect the inner workings of our minds,” said Rafael Yusuf, professor of biological sciences and director, NeuroTechnology Center, Columbia University, as well as Chairman of the NeuroRights Foundation and leading figure in the neutotech ethics organization Morningside Group. “The brain is not just another organ of the body,” he added. “We need to engage private actors to ensure they adopt a responsible innovation framework, as the brain is the sanctuary of our minds.”
Pauzauskie said the value to companies comes in the interpretation or decoding of the brain signals collected by wearable technologies. As a hypothetical example, he said, “if you were wearing brain-sensing earbuds, not only would Nike know that you browsed for runners’ shoes from your browsing history, but could now know how interested you were as you browsed.”
A wave of biological privacy legislation may be needed
The concern targeted by the Colorado law may lead to a wave of similar legislation, with heightened attention to the mingling of rapidly-advancing technologies and the commodification of user data. In the past, consumer rights and protections have lagged behind innovation.
“The best and most recent tech/privacy analogies might be the internet and consumer genetic revolutions, which largely went unchecked,” Pauzauskie said.
A similar arc could follow unchecked advancements in the collection and commodification of consumer brain data. Hacking, corporate profit motives, ever-changing privacy agreements for users, and narrow to no laws covering the data, are all major risks, Pauzauskie said. Under the Colorado Privacy Act, brain data is extended the same privacy rights as fingerprints.
According to Professor Farinaz Koushanfar and Associate Professor Duygu Kuzum of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, it is still too early to understand the limitations of the technology, as well as the depths of the potentially intrusive data collection.
Tracking neural data could mean tracking a broad range of cognitive processes and functions, including thoughts, intentions, and memories, they wrote in a joint statement sent via email. At one extreme, tracking neural data might mean accessing medical information directly.
The broad range of possibilities is itself an issue. “There are too many unknowns still in this field and that’s worrisome,” they wrote.
If these laws become widespread, companies may have no choice but to overhaul their current organizational structure, according to Koushanfar and Kuzum. There may be a need for establishing new compliance officers, and implementing methods such as risk assessment, third-party auditing and anonymization as mechanisms for establishing requirements for the entities involved.
On the consumer side, the Colorado law and any subsequent efforts represent important steps toward better educating users, as well as giving them the required tools to check and exercise their rights should they be infringed.
“The privacy law [in Colorado] regarding neurotechnology might stand as a rare exception, where rights and regulations precede any widespread misuse or abuse of consumer data,” Pauzauskie said.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
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Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
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Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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