A neuroright is a subjective right that protects mental processes and neural data against non-consensual reading-out, manipulative writing-in, and commercial exploitation. The family encompasses three core protected goods: mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty. Added to these are the right to equal access to cognitive augmentation and the right to protection against algorithmic biases.
Neurorights are not rights invented by positing, but concretizations of already recognized fundamental rights — privacy, bodily integrity, self-determination — onto the new technical situation. In personal-ontological terms they are anchored in the dignity of the person and in its interiority: what happens within the person belongs categorially not to the state, the employer, or the market.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: Right (in particular fundamental right); subordinate concepts: Mental Privacy, Mental Integrity, Cognitive Liberty.
Three protected goods
Mental privacy protects against the non-consensual reading-out of neural or mentally-inferable data. It encompasses thoughts, moods, intentions, memories — everything that could become accessible through BCI read-out, EEG headsets, emotion recognition, or neural imaging.
Mental integrity protects against manipulative writing-in to mental processes — directly through electrical stimulation, indirectly through neuromarketing, emotion targeting, or algorithmic affect modulation.
Cognitive liberty protects the right to self-determination of mental processes: no compelled neuro-surveillance, no compelled disclosure of cognitive information, no obligation to cognitive augmentation.
International situation 2025/2026
Chile was in 2021 the first country to anchor neurorights at the constitutional level (amendment of Article 19 No. 1) and to concretize them in ordinary law through Law 21.383. The Chilean Supreme Court ruled in 2023 on the seizure of EEG data from a consumer headset in the sense of an independent “neurodata” protection category.
UNESCO adopted in 2025 the Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology. Stanford Law (March 2026) assesses it as the most significant soft-law instrument for neurotechnology to date.
Council of Europe has been working since 2024 on a neurotechnology convention.
European Union since 2 February 2025 prohibits, with Article 5(1)(f) of the AI Regulation, emotion recognition in the workplace and in educational institutions — exceptions only for medical or safety reasons. Annex III classifies remaining emotion recognition as a high-risk AI application.
OECD flanks this with a toolkit presented in 2024 for implementing the neurotechnology principles.
Personal-ontological justification
Neurorights concretize the interiority of the person. The personalist tradition (Wojtyła, Spaemann, Seifert) holds that the person does not coincide with surfaces of behavior, but is given in its inner side — consciousness, conscience, free self-determination. Whoever makes the inner technically accessible without express consent violates not a peripheral data-protection right, but the person itself.
Demarcation from general data protection
Data protection protects data about a person; neuroright protects the inner of the person. The difference is not gradual but categorial. An analysis of location data shows where a person was; a neural decoding pipeline shows what they thought. The second piece of information is not an extreme special case of the first, but a different sphere.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. (Research basis: dossier HCI / BCI — worldwide research.)
Further sources:
- UNESCO (2025): Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.
- República de Chile (2021): Constitutional amendment Art. 19 No. 1 as well as Ley 21.383.
- Stanford Law Biosciences Blog (March 2026): Who Owns Digital Thoughts? The Limits of Property Law and the 2025 UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.
- European Union (2024): Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Regulation), in particular Art. 5 and Annex III.
- OECD (2024): Neurotechnology Toolkit. To support policymakers in implementing the OECD Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology. Published April 2024.
- Future of Privacy Forum (2024): Privacy and the Rise of Neurorights in Latin America.