Emotiv, others quietly feed brain data to AI: Science

The Science investigation centers on a gap between what consumer EEG headbands collect and what their privacy policies tell users. According to the report, makers like Emotiv have built up tens of millions of hours of brain-wave recordings, and those recordings are being used to train 'large brain models' without that use being disclosed. The detail that at least one company updated its policy only after Science flagged the practice suggests the disclosure gap was not incidental but responsive to outside scrutiny.

The absence of a firm US regulatory framework for biometric neural data is the backdrop. With few constraints on storing, sharing, or repurposing such recordings, the investigation frames the data as unusually sensitive—one scientist calls it 'the most sensitive data a person has.' That characterization, tied to the lack of rules, is the context in which the undisclosed AI training took place.