Signal describing nervous system activity, produced continuously by a brain-computer interface, irrevocable like biometrics and inferential in addition.
Neural data shares the irrevocability of biometric data and adds two properties that worsen it. It is produced continuously rather than at an act of authentication, which multiplies volume and granularity. And it is inferential by nature, meaning that a signal collected to move a cursor contains information nobody asked for. Precision is needed here to avoid overstatement: a surface electrical signal does not permit a formulated thought to be read. It does permit states to be estimated, cognitive load, fatigue, attention, emotional response to a stimulus, with variable but non-zero reliability, and those are precisely the categories the law protects specially where they concern health. The boundary between data collected and data derivable is where most of the coming litigation will sit.
An operator may maintain in good faith that it processes only a command signal while holding, by derivation, information of another nature.
neural data, donnée cérébrale, neurodonnée, neurodroits