Mental privacy is a neuroright that protects against the non-consensual read-out of neuronal or mentally inferable data. Protected are thoughts, moods, intentions, memories — all inner processes that might become accessible through BCI read-out, electroencephalography (EEG), functional imaging, emotion-recognition systems, or through inference from behavioral data.
In personhood-ontological terms, mental privacy is not a peripheral data-protection right, but the protection of the interiority of the person. The personalist tradition (Wojtyła, Spaemann) holds that the person does not dissolve into surfaces of behavior, but is given in their inner side — consciousness, conscience, free self-determination. Whoever makes the interior technically accessible without consent violates not a right of the person, but the person themselves.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Neuroright; related to: the right to privacy.
Three forms of intervention
Direct decoding interventions — BCI implants, EEG headsets, and MEG scanners can (at varying resolution) read out neuronal correlates of mental processes. Without express, prior consent, any such read-out is unlawful.
Inference interventions — modern classifiers can infer, from behavior (keystroke patterns, facial movements, speech prosody), mood, attention, cognitive load, and even political preferences. The question whether such inference is “read-out” in the neuro-legal sense is contested; the UNESCO Recommendation 2025 follows an extensive interpretation that includes inference as soon as the output information is mentally characteristic.
Persistence interventions — even lawfully collected neurodata become problematic when they are stored indefinitely and later evaluated for other purposes. The Chilean Supreme Court ruled in 2023, in a case concerning consumer EEG headsets, that subsequent evaluation too requires protection of the legal good.
Personhood-ontological grounding
Mental privacy is, personalistically, not a peripheral data-protection right, but the protection of the interiority of the person themselves. Three ontological arguments support the level of protection:
First argument — interiority as the essence of the person. The personalist tradition (Wojtyła, The Acting Person; Spaemann, Persons) holds that the person does not dissolve into surfaces of behavior, but is given in their inner side — consciousness, conscience, free self-determination. Whoever makes the interior technically accessible without consent violates not a peripheral right of the person, but the person themselves in that wherein they are properly a person.
Second argument — personal autonomy over what is one’s own. The dignity of the person comprises the power of disposal over what belongs to them in the strictest sense. Mental processes are, in a strict sense, one’s own — not property in the market sense, but one’s own in the personalist sense. They belong to no one else, not to the state, not to the employer, not to the market.
Third argument — protection of the authenticity of personal acts. Whoever knows that their mental processes are being read out can no longer enact their acts out of themselves, but only under the gaze of surveillance. This deforms the authenticity of personal enactments — conscience, prayer, honest self-clarification, free formation of the will — and thereby undermines the condition under which the person can be themselves at all.
Application in work and education
With Article 5(1)(f) of the AI Act, the European Union has prohibited emotion-recognition systems in the workplace and in educational institutions — exceptions only for medical or safety reasons. The prohibition has been applicable since 2 February 2025. The justification is sound in personhood-ethical terms: in educational and employment relationships there is a structural power imbalance that in fact excludes free consent to the capture of mental data.
Distinction from general data-protection regulation
Data protection protects data about a person; mental privacy protects the interior of the person. Whoever levels the difference treats neuronal decoding information like address or credit data — as a market commodity with a fiction of consent. Personalist ethics demands its own, sharper category of protection.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- UNESCO (2025): Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.
- Republic of Chile, Supreme Court (2023): Judgment in the Emotiv headset case (Insight model).
- European Union (2024): Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Art. 5(1)(f).
- Ienca, M. & Andorno, R. (2017): Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13: 5.
- Yuste, R. et al. (2017): Four ethical priorities for neurotechnologies and AI. Nature 551: 159—163.
See also
Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.