At The Tech We Want for Our Brain Commons Online Summit (15 July 2026), researchers, developers, policymakers, journalists, civil society and industry representatives explored how openness can help shape a future in which neurotech is aligned with human rights.
Alternative links: Internet Archive | YouTube
This panel brought together Solana Larsen (Open Knowledge Foundation, moderator), Zoe Steine-Hanson (OpenBCI), Christoph Guger (g.tec) and Harry Halpin (Nym Technologies) to examine brain-computer interface technology layer by layer—from hardware to neural data—to identify areas where openness fosters innovation and security and where it must yield to safety or privacy concerns.
Steine-Hanson and Guger showed that openness should vary by layer: openness of hardware and software components help enable medical research and community innovation, including in hackathons and recent training workshops involving thousands of people, while some firmware and medical devices are closed due to safety—including due to rules around interference in electromagnetic fields.
Halpin argued that open standards are crucial for ensuring interoperability and safeguarding rights. He pointed to failures such as Do Not Track and GDPR consent-fatigue as cautionary precedents from the Web stack, and argued that privacy should also be protected through decentralised encryption of data (and metadata)—also in order to provide more possibilities for user control over data.
As BCI devices become more widespread, the group agreed that regulations, ethical guidelines and standards for interoperability and user-control will be essential in order to prevent abuse.
Key Takeaways:
- The BCI ecosystem ranges from open-source hardware to closed, medically certified systems. Openness is often limited by safety, certification and regulatory requirements.
- While current BCI technology cannot literally “read minds”, neural data combined with machine learning could be used for behavioural prediction and manipulation—a risk that increases as both invasive and non-invasive technology gain more capacities.
- Panellists emphasised that governance should (and often already does happen) through regulation, as well as a range of standards, consumer protections, and ethical guidelines.
- Based on past experience, use of encryption and genuine user consent and control over data (and meta-data) would be more reliable safeguards than corporate promises.
- Lessons from the wearables market (e.g. closed data formats and a lack of user access to raw data) are a cautionary example of how BCI data standards should not evolve.
- Potential medical and social benefits of aggregated neural data (e.g. for predicting dementia or improving treatments) have to be balanced with the risk of misuse by insurers, employers or governments.
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