You have to admire their audacity. After a receiving a $5B fine for misleading consumers on data collection and running into regulatory scrutiny on Libra, their cryptocurrency project, it has come out that Facebook has been funding research on machines that read peoples’ thoughts. From MIT Technology review:
Today, some of that research was described in a scientific paper from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers have been developing “speech decoders” able to determine what people are trying to say by analyzing their brain signals.
It’s not really surprising that big tech would enter this game, given that Elon Musk is working on something similar. It’s exciting research and could have huge benefits for those who are disabled, as well as for everyone else. I think that this is great and we should pursue it.
At the same time, the potential to collect data from the human brain at a time when we haven’t figured out how to do privacy is very concerning. The possibility of brain-computer interfaces in the near future makes it all the more urgent to figure out as a society what the limits are for the collection and sharing of user data. We need definitions of what data is public, what is private, and whether the data belongs to the companies collect it, or the individuals whose behavior produces the data.
It’s all the more concerning that this is being done by a company who has broken the trust of its users time and time again.
It’s getting very urgent.
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