With the increasing number of technologies that track brain activity, a new Colorado law aims to protect people's "neural data" from falling into the wrong hands, The New York Times reported.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed the first-of-its-kind legislation April 17 that gives data collected from people's brains the same protections as other biometric information, such as fingerprints and facial images, according to the April 17 story. Lawmakers in California and Minnesota are considering similar bills.
The legislation comes as startups like Elon Musk's Neuralink are implanting devices in human brains to stimulate neurological activity and other companies offer headbands that monitor brain activity to help treat anxiety and depression, the news outlet reported.
"Everything that we are is within our mind," Jared Genser, co-founder and general counsel of the Neurorights Foundation, told the Times. "What we think and feel, and the ability to decode that from the human brain, couldn't be any more intrusive or personal to us."
While neural data derived from clinical settings is already covered by HIPAA, the Colorado legislation extends the protections to consumer technologies, the newspaper reported.