The Moment Your Brain Became a Balance Sheet Item
I spent two decades watching privacy regulations play catch-up with technology. Social media, smartphone tracking, behavioral advertising—the pattern was always the same. Innovation sprints ahead, regulators stumble behind, and consumers wake up years later wondering who has their data. But nothing I've witnessed comes close to what's unfolding right now with brain-computer interfaces.
Here's what kept me up last week: Elon Musk announced that Neuralink will start "high-volume production" of brain implant devices in 2026, with plans for "a streamlined, almost entirely automated surgical procedure." That's not a research milestone. That's an industrial rollout. Over 10,000 people are already on Neuralink's waiting list, and the company secured $650 million in a Series E funding round in June 2025 at a $9 billion valuation.
The financial implications are staggering. But so is the legal vacuum these devices are about to enter. Your thoughts—the last truly private space you own—are about to become data points. And the regulatory framework meant to protect them? It barely exists.
The $53 Billion Market Nobody's Talking About
Let's ground this in numbers, because that's where the real story lives.
The global neurotechnology market reached approximately $15.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to surge to $52.86 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of 13.19%. Morgan Stanley's analysis is even more ambitious: the brain-computer interface market alone represents a total addressable market of $400 billion, positioning it as what their analysts call "the next big opportunity in med tech."
Where is this money flowing? The capital allocation tells you everything about where the smart money sees the future. Sam Altman's brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs just raised a $250 million seed round at an $850 million valuation, with OpenAI writing the largest single check. Bezos and Gates are backing Synchron. Founders Fund and Google Ventures sit on Neuralink's cap table.
For individual investors, the opportunity set is expanding rapidly. Neuromodulation companies like Inspire Medical Systems, LivaNova, NeuroPace, CVRx, and BrainsWay offer immediate exposure to FDA-approved revenue streams. These aren't speculative bets—they're established businesses with predictable cash flows riding a secular growth wave.
But here's the financial risk nobody's pricing in: regulatory uncertainty. The same capital flooding into neurotechnology could face massive write-downs if emerging neuro-rights legislation restricts how companies can collect, use, and monetize brain data. And that legislation is coming faster than most investors realize.
What Your Brain Data Actually Reveals
Before we can understand the legal battle, you need to grasp what's at stake. "Neural data" sounds abstract until you realize what it can expose.
Brain wearables create "an intimate window into our brain states, emotions and even memories." Current consumer-grade EEG devices—not the high-end medical equipment, but the headphones and headbands already on store shelves—can infer "inner language, attention, emotion, sexual orientation and arousal among other cognitive functions."
The decoding capabilities are advancing faster than most people appreciate. Researchers demonstrated they could correctly identify almost half of 512 spoken phrases using EEG recordings, and accuracy improves as more data is collected. Your neural patterns can be used to create a "brain fingerprint" that identifies you as uniquely as your face or fingerprints. Researchers have used MRI-based neurotechnology to determine the exact picture an individual is viewing from a 100,000-image database, or predict what choice someone will make 11 seconds before they're even conscious of making it.
What makes this different from other biometric data? Permanence. Your brain data can be used to identify you even if collected anonymously, simply by processing it alongside social media pictures of your face. You can change a password. You can't change your neural signature.
Now imagine this data in the hands of your employer, your insurance company, or foreign intelligence services. That's not dystopian speculation—it's the regulatory gap we're living in right now.
The Patchwork Protection Problem
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for anyone hoping the government has this under control. The current regulatory landscape for neural data protection is, to put it charitably, a mess.
As of mid-2025, only four U.S. states have enacted laws specifically addressing neural data: California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Montana. Each law defines "neural data" differently, creating compliance nightmares for companies operating nationally. Connecticut's law, for instance, applies solely to central nervous system data, which means peripheral nervous system signals—like the data from your smartwatch measuring heart rate variability that can indicate stress or emotional states—fall outside its scope.
California's law prevents companies from selling or sharing neural data and requires efforts to de-identify the data, while giving consumers the right to know what's collected and to delete it. Colorado requires explicit opt-in consent for neural data collection. But critics argue these protections have significant loopholes. One ethicist noted that the California law's language "suggests that raw data may be protected, but inferences or conclusions—where privacy risks are most profound—might not be."
The federal picture is even bleaker. HIPAA protects neural data only when it's received or created by covered healthcare entities. Consumer neurotechnology products? The FDA's authority doesn't extend to commercial uses of BCI technology because those are typically categorized as consumer electronics rather than medical devices.
This creates what privacy advocates call the "wellness loophole." A brain-reading headband marketed for meditation or focus optimization faces virtually no federal oversight for how it handles your neural data—even though that data could reveal clinical depression, early-onset dementia, or other conditions you might not even know you have.
The MIND Act: Federal Intervention on the Horizon
Washington is finally paying attention. In September 2025, Senators Chuck Schumer, Maria Cantwell, and Ed Markey introduced the MIND Act (Management of Individuals' Neural Data Act), the first serious attempt at comprehensive federal neural data regulation.
The proposed legislation would direct the Federal Trade Commission to examine how neural data should be protected and develop a regulatory framework enabling it to restrict companies that misuse neural data—potentially through fines, injunctive relief, or other enforcement mechanisms.
Critically, the MIND Act adopts a very broad definition of neural data that includes information from both the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system—meaning heart rate variability, eye tracking patterns, voice analysis, facial expressions, and sleep patterns could all fall under its umbrella. This expansive scope acknowledges what privacy researchers have been warning: limiting protection to direct brain measurements ignores the reality that cognitive states can be inferred from many types of biometric data.
The Act references specific concerns including "mind and behavior manipulation, monetization of neural data, neuromarketing, erosion of personal autonomy, discrimination, exploitation, surveillance, and access to the minds of U.S. citizens by foreign actors." It also calls for identifying gaps in protection for children and teens and analyzing security risks.
For investors, the MIND Act represents both opportunity and threat. Companies that proactively build privacy-respecting neural data practices could gain competitive advantage as regulation tightens. Those betting on aggressive data monetization may face significant headwinds.
Workplace Surveillance: The Front Line of the Neuro-Rights Battle
If you want to see where the neuro-rights conflict is already playing out, look at your office.
The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office predicts neurotechnology will be common in workplaces by the end of the decade. Companies like Emotiv are already marketing EEG earbuds for "workplace wellness, safety, and productivity" that measure "changes in your levels of stress and attention."
The pitch sounds benign: help employees manage stress, prevent fatigue-related accidents, optimize focus. But the implications go beyond safety and productivity. Granting employers access to workers' brain data raises concerns about control and appropriate use, whether as a safety measure or as a tool for evaluating employees' cognitive abilities.
Consider the power dynamics at play. Given the imbalance between employers and employees, workers have limited ability to refuse neurosurveillance without suffering disadvantages or risking their jobs. The technology that promises to reduce workplace stress could become the most invasive form of employee monitoring ever deployed.
The EU's AI Act now prohibits the use of AI systems to infer emotions in the workplace and educational institutions, unless it serves a clearly defined medical or safety purpose. This represents one of the strongest protections globally—but U.S. workers have no equivalent shield.
The legal term emerging for this concern is "neurodiscrimination": employers making employment decisions such as whether to fire somebody based on their brainwave data, which could contain signs of cognitive decline. Current employment law wasn't designed to address an employer knowing that your focus dropped 15% last month or that your neural patterns suggest early-stage cognitive impairment. These are questions the courts haven't answered because, until recently, they didn't need to ask them.
Chile's Supreme Court Ruling: A Global Precedent
While American regulators deliberate, Chile has already established binding legal precedent.
Chile became the first country to add protection for neural systems by amending its constitution in 2021, protecting "cerebral activity and the information drawn from it" as a constitutional right. This wasn't symbolic. In 2023, Chile's Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling ordering the company Emotiv to delete a consumer's neural data, finding that its collection violated mental privacy protections.
This was the world's first court ruling specifically protecting brain data from a consumer neurotechnology device. Emotiv—the same company marketing workplace EEG earbuds—was forced to delete data it had collected for research purposes without proper consent.
The Chilean precedent is rippling across Latin America. A similar constitutional amendment was approved in 2023 in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and legislators in Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay have introduced bills addressing similar concerns.
Why should U.S. investors care about Chilean constitutional law? Because global companies operate globally. Most of the consumer neurotechnology companies identified in privacy reviews are based in countries with existing data protection laws, yet neural data is often not explicitly recognized as personal or sensitive data in these jurisdictions. A company that can't comply with Chilean neuro-rights law loses access to that market. As more countries follow Chile's lead, the compliance costs for aggressive data practices multiply.
The Privacy Audit That Should Terrify You
In April 2024, the Neurorights Foundation released a comprehensive review of consumer neurotechnology companies' privacy practices. The findings should concern anyone considering a brain-reading device—or investing in companies that make them.
The report found that "a vast majority of neurotech companies collect users' brain data with few limits, vague policies, and reserve sweeping rights to share it—often without the individual's meaningful consent." Over 60% of the companies' policies do not disclose how consumer neural data is managed and what rights consumers have in relation to it.
This isn't a case of a few bad actors. The entire industry appears to have built its data practices on the assumption that neural data can be treated like any other user information—collected broadly, retained indefinitely, shared liberally. That assumption is about to collide with emerging legal frameworks that classify neural data as uniquely sensitive.
Although neurodata legislation may be inevitable, neurotech companies and trade groups can be proactive. By developing industry standards and best practices now, companies can provide legislators with frameworks that are workable while also providing strong protections for consumers. The companies that lead on privacy may find themselves shaping the regulations rather than scrambling to comply with them.
Investment Implications: Navigating the Neuro-Rights Landscape
So where does this leave the investor trying to participate in neurotechnology's growth while managing regulatory risk?
Favor medical over consumer applications. Neural data in clinical workflows and patient care falls under existing HIPAA protections and FDA oversight. Companies like Blackrock Neurotech, which has more implanted devices in human patients than any other BCI company—over 30—operate within established regulatory frameworks. The regulatory uncertainty is concentrated in consumer applications where wellness headbands and productivity earbuds fall through regulatory gaps.
Watch the privacy practices, not just the technology. Companies should adopt privacy-by-design principles, embed safeguards from the earliest stages of development, and provide clear information about how neural data is collected, used, and stored. Those that don't are accumulating regulatory debt that will come due as neuro-rights legislation expands.
Diversify across the value chain. Neuromodulation companies offer immediate exposure to FDA-approved revenue streams, while diagnostics companies bring critical brain data to clinical settings, and BCI developers provide higher-beta exposure to emerging applications. This tiered approach balances growth potential against regulatory risk.
Monitor state legislative activity. Companies developing or deploying neurotechnologies, especially those involving wearables, wellness applications, biometric devices or employee productivity tools, should prepare for a shifting compliance landscape. Legal obligations will likely vary significantly by state, sector and use case.
The Five Neuro-Rights Framework
What rights are advocates actually fighting for? The emerging consensus coalesces around five fundamental neuro-rights that could shape regulation globally.
The right to mental privacy. No entity—government, corporation, or individual—should have access to your brain data without explicit, informed consent. This includes protection against involuntary brain scanning, mandatory neural monitoring, and covert collection of neural information.
The right to personal identity. Your neural patterns define who you are in ways more fundamental than your fingerprints or DNA. Protection of personal identity means safeguarding against manipulations that could fundamentally alter your sense of self, memories, or personality.
The right to free will. The Minnesota proposal would prohibit companies from using a brain-computer interface to bypass conscious decision-making by an individual. As BCIs become capable of influencing brain activity—not just reading it—protecting autonomous decision-making becomes essential.
The right to fair access. If neurotechnology can enhance cognitive function, access shouldn't be determined solely by ability to pay. This principle acknowledges that cognitive enhancement technologies could exacerbate existing inequalities if only the wealthy can afford them.
The right to protection from algorithmic bias. Neural data processed by AI systems can perpetuate or amplify biases. The MIND Act specifically asks the FTC to identify gaps in protection and analyze potential discrimination and exploitation risks.
These rights aren't law anywhere yet. But they're increasingly influencing the legislative drafts working their way through statehouses and Congress. Understanding them helps you anticipate where regulation is headed.
The Security Dimension Nobody's Discussing
Privacy isn't the only concern. Senators specifically asked the FTC to analyze potential security risks associated with neurotechnology and concerns about access to the minds of U.S. citizens by foreign actors.
Consider what a neural data breach would mean. From probing for information to intercepting PIN numbers as we think or type them, neural cybersecurity will become essential. Unlike a credit card number, you can't cancel your brain patterns and get new ones. A neural data breach is permanent.
Companies including China's Entertech have accumulated millions of raw EEG data recordings from individuals across the world using consumer brain wearables, along with personal information and device usage data. The national security implications of large-scale neural data collection by foreign entities are only beginning to enter policy discussions.
For investors, this security dimension cuts both ways. It creates opportunities for companies developing neural cybersecurity solutions—an entirely new category that barely existed five years ago. But it also means that any neurotechnology company with inadequate security practices faces existential risk from a single breach.
What Happens Next
The pace of change is accelerating. Twelve patients with severe paralysis worldwide are currently using Neuralink implants to control digital and physical tools through thought. Neuralink's Blindsight implant, aimed at restoring vision for people who are completely blind, is scheduled for its first patient trial in 2026. Merge Labs is working on bridging biological and artificial intelligence to "maximize human ability."
These aren't distant possibilities. They're happening now, with commercial rollouts planned for this year.
Meanwhile, Connecticut's neural data protections go into effect July 1, 2026. Additional states are advancing their own proposals. Massachusetts has proposed prohibiting collection or processing of neural data unless strictly necessary for a product or service, and barring its use for targeted advertising. The FTC is building expertise in neural data regulation that could eventually support enforcement actions.
I've been watching technology regulation long enough to know how this plays out. The companies that take privacy seriously from the start—that build consent and transparency into their products rather than bolting them on later—tend to fare better when regulation arrives. The ones that maximize data extraction and figure they'll deal with compliance later often find "later" comes sooner than expected.
The neuro-rights battle is about more than data policy. It's about what kind of relationship humans will have with technology that can read, interpret, and potentially influence our thoughts. The financial stakes are measured in tens of billions of dollars. The human stakes are harder to quantify—but ultimately more important.
We're in the window where the rules are still being written. For investors, advocates, and anyone who values the privacy of their own mind, this is the moment to engage. The legal war for brain data has begun, and the outcome will shape the next century of human-technology interaction.