?Our notion of privacy will be useless?: what happens if technology learns to read our minds? - The Guardian

Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology company born in Melbourne that has successfully trialled hi-tech brain implants that allow people to send emails and texts purely by thought.

BCIs, which allow a person to control a device via a connection between their brain and a computer, are seen as a gamechanger for people with certain disabilities.

BCIs are one of a range of developing technologies centred on the brain. Brain stimulation is another, which delivers targeted electrical pulses to the brain and is used to treat cognitive disorders. Others, like imaging techniques fMRI and EEG, can monitor the brain in real time.

In 2017 a young European bioethicist, Marcello Ienca, was anticipating these potential dangers. He proposed a new class of legal rights: neuro rights, the freedom to decide who is allowed to monitor, read or alter your brain.

Today Ienca is a Professor of Bioethics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and advises the European Council, the UN, OECD, and governments on the impact technology could have on our sense of what it means to be human.

Before Ienca proposed the concept of neuro rights, he had already come to believe that the sanctity of our brains needed protection from advancing neurotechnology.

Neuro rights are a positive as well as protective force, Ienca says.

Grant believes neuro rights will not be enough to protect our privacy from the potential reach of neurotech outside medicine.

Grant sees the amount of information that people already share, including neuro data, as an insurmountable challenge for neuro rights.

The consequences of sharing neuro data preoccupies many ethicists.

Chile is not taking any chances on the potential risks of neurotechnology.

Europe is also making moves towards neuro rights.

Carter points out that some of the threats ascribed to future neurotechnology are already present in the way data is used by tech companies every day.

AI and algorithms that read eye movement and detect changes in skin colour and temperature are reading the results of brain activity in controlled studies for advertising. This data has been used by commercial interests for years to analyse, predict and nudge behaviour.

Concerns about the misuse of neurotech by rogue actors do not detract from what it is already achieving in the medical sphere.

One treatment being tested is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which is already used extensively to treat depression and was listed on the Medicare benefit schedule last year.

When Zia Liddell, 26, began TMS treatment at the Epworth centre about five years ago, she had low expectations. Liddell has trauma-induced schizophrenia and has experienced hallucinations since she was 14.

It is a quietening of the mind that Liddell says takes effect about the three- to five-day mark of a two-week treatment.

But despite how it has changed her life for the better, she is not naive about the dangers of setting neurotech loose in the world.