Page - 193 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

Cyberneuroethics • 193 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. Similarly, the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms indicates in Article 8 (‘Right to respect for private and family life’): 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Therefore, privacy should be defended, because it protects the dignity and integrity of the whole person and, in the context of neurotechnology, the right to mental privacy guards the information from a person’s mind from unauthorised collection, storage, use or even deletion.432 Such a right is important when persons may unconsciously be surrendering parts of them- selves to others whom they do not know and have no way of knowing. This is one of the reasons why a right to be forgotten in EU law is seen as being cru- cial. This is a perceived right for individuals to determine the development of their lives in an autonomous way, without experiencing discrimination as a consequence of a specific past action. In this context, Ienca and Andorno argue that ‘current privacy and data protection rights are insufficient to cope with the emerging neurotechnologi- cal scenarios. Consequently, we suggest the formal recognition of a right to mental privacy, which aims to protect any bit or set of brain information about an individual recorded by a neurodevice and shared across the digital ecosystem’. They indicate that this right should protect not only neuronal information as data, but also the sources of such information, including whether it is obtained from a person when he or she was conscious.433 Such rights to privacy may mean that special software, enabling anonymous use of neuronal interface systems, may need to be developed for: – circumventing censorship; – anonymous activism and journalism; – undercover online surveillance; – protection from criminals; This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.