The Ethics of the Cognitive Sciences: privacy and respect for persons

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Ethics of the Cognitive Sciences – Privacy and Respect for Persons

LSE: Public lectures and events | LSE Film and Audio Team | November 13, 2013

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Episode Overview

This public panel, organized by the Forum for European Philosophy at LSE, brings together leading philosophers and ethicists to explore the ethical challenges posed by cognitive neuroscience and neurotechnology, focusing on issues of privacy and respect for persons. Speakers Sarah Edwards, Sarah Richmond, and Roger Brownsworth dissect the limits of current neuroimaging technologies, the conceptual importance of privacy and respect, and the implications for law, regulation, and society, including the dangers of overhyping technological risks, the challenges of consent, and surveillance.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Technological Capabilities and Privacy Concerns

• Sarah Edwards introduces how diverse methods in cognitive science, including high-resolution brain imaging, are designed to uncover neural correlates of thought and intention (01:32).
  • Brain as the "inner sanctum" – culturally and philosophically treated as the seat of individuality and creativity.
  • Technological limitations: PET, EEG, and fMRI are currently invasive, costly, or limited in resolution (04:38).
  • Expanding availability: Brain scanners are shifting from medical to consumer devices (e.g., EEG-based apps).
  • Case study: U.S. legal case (Kyllo) shows how emerging technology can challenge and redefine legal standards for privacy (06:20).
• Challenges with Informed Consent:
  • Consent does not always equal meaningful protection—subjects may not understand or foresee the implications and non-therapeutic uses of data (10:00).
  • Incidental findings in imaging raise issues of unwanted, un-erasable knowledge and third-party access (10:45).

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2. Respect for Persons and the Nature of Privacy

• Sarah Richmond emphasizes the concept of respect separate from the consequence-based reasoning around privacy breaches (12:00).
  • Respect is about entitlement to non-intrusive attitudes: "It's not, I don't want you to find this out, but I don't want you to have that attitude towards me." (15:36)
  • Illustrations:
    • Eliza Doolittle (Pygmalion): Fundamental discomfort even when one has "done nothing wrong" signals unmet respect, not just fear of harm.
    • Ornithologist analogy: Animals don’t care about being observed, but humans do, reinforcing the unique value of respect for personal mental space.
  • Thought experiment:
    • Transparency of minds would radically change social life, in ways hard to imagine (17:45).
    • Reference to Judith Jarvis Thomson's "people seeds"—demonstrates that radical social changes subvert easy analogies or predictions.
  • Privacy and shame:
    • Loss of privacy might have unexpected upsides: reducing unnecessary shame and fostering empathy (20:51).

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3. Law, Regulation, Human Dignity, and Social Control

• Roger Brownsworth frames cognitive neuroscience within broader debates on regulating emerging technologies (21:50).
  • Emergent technology discourses are driven by tensions between technophiles (who fear overregulation stifling progress) and those cautious of risks.
  • Three key social values/concerns:
    1. Risk – Danger to public health, safety, or environment.
    2. Human Rights – Compatibility (including privacy as a derivative of rights language).
    3. Human Dignity – Especially prominent in European legal frameworks after the Treaty of Lisbon.
  • Privacy Benchmarks (41:23):
    1. Privacy as property: Is access inherently wrong, beyond consequences?
    2. Reasonable expectations: What’s considered private changes with social and technological norms (52:00).
    3. Consent: Is consent too casual? Should it require explicit, opt-in signaling?
    4. Ranking of privacy: How does it stand against property or freedom of expression?
  • Regulatory dangers:
    • Surveillance and technological social control risk undermining moral agency: “You can only do the right thing for the right reason if you have some freedom to do the thing you’re doing and you have options available to you.” (39:32)
    • Example: Supermarket trolleys with GPS; conduct managed without genuine moral engagement.
    • The worry is a society where rule-following is engineered, not chosen: “No virtue in doing the right thing if you can’t do the wrong thing.” (41:04)

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4. Audience Questions and Panel Discussion

A. Can We Learn from Other Regulatory Successes? (45:34)

• Example: IVF regulation in the UK credited as a success—broad debate, expert panels, and careful, transparent licensing (45:34).
• Challenges:
  • Global variation undermines strict national controls.
  • Privacy threats are more diffuse and far harder to regulate than technologies like assisted conception.

B. Proportionality and Hype: Is Neurotechnology Special?

• Should brain scans be regulated differently than other methods of learning about people (coffee preferences, subtle cues)? Are we overestimating cognitive science’s power? (49:33, 52:26)

C. The Collingridge Dilemma

• Early on, it's unclear what technologies’ risks or benefits will be. By the time risks are understood, it's often too late to regulate effectively (54:42).

D. Nature and Limits of Privacy—and Analogies to Property

• Is privacy truly analogous to property, allowing one to say "this is mine, back off" regardless of the consequences? (55:21)

E. Psychiatric Cases and Technological Change

• Example: Schizophrenia patients experiencing “idea broadcasting”—if technology advances, such beliefs might not seem delusional (57:31).
  • Raises the prospect that new technologies fundamentally shift the boundaries of normality and pathology (60:09).

F. Profiling, Determinism, and Ethics (62:10)

• Concerns about linking brain/genetic data to deterministic predictions (e.g., insurance premiums, criminal risk), and the philosophical ambiguity of such predictions.
  • Panel: Most actual science deals with probabilities, not certainties; risk assessments are not strictly deterministic (65:32).

G. Social Networks and Voluntary Surrender of Privacy (68:02)

• Why do people so willingly relinquish information? Partly due to lack of foresight, but also for inherent psychological rewards (social recognition, validation) (72:06).
  • Quote: “Expressing information about yourself in a sort of publishing way…is inherently rewarding and people get satisfaction out of knowing that everybody knows something about them.” – Host (72:43)

H. Biometrics, Biocryptography, and Evolving Privacy Threats (75:09)

• New biometric methods (e.g., brain patterns as passwords) provoke questions: Should we treat "brain signatures" as fundamentally different from fingerprints?
  • Integrated systems (mobile + biometrics + predictive analytics) could enable fine-grained surveillance (“digital dog tag”) (82:38).
  • Right to erasure and new data protection frameworks will be tested by such advances.

I. The Erosion of Privacy and Mental Health (85:01)

• Does persistent exposure and loss of privacy damage well-being? Panel agrees privacy is vital for experimentation, non-conformity, and psychological comfort.
  • “In a free society you need some privacy. Otherwise, you’re constantly…just worried about having to stay on the norm.” – Brownsworth (85:19)

J. Public Engagement and Democratic Oversight (90:01)

• Principle: Deliberative democracy should drive tech regulation.
• Practice: True engagement is difficult. Public education and authentic participation lag behind technological change, and sometimes “public engagement” is performative (90:01–92:19).

K. Children and Privacy (92:46)

• Research on children is vexing for consent; reliance on "best interests" is problematic as it’s vague and susceptible to abuse (92:55).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"We often think of the brain as being the seat of our souls, the source of all value, of our creativity and of our mental freedom. Is it our inner sanctum that is out of bounds for science?"
– Sarah Edwards (02:12)

"It's not, I don't want you to find this out, but I don't want you to have that attitude towards me. That's not an attitude you're entitled to have, at least not without my consent."
– Sarah Richmond (15:36)

"No virtue in doing the right thing if you can’t do the wrong thing."
– Roger Brownsworth (41:04)

“Expressing information about yourself…is inherently rewarding and people get satisfaction out of knowing that everybody knows something about them.”
– Host (72:43)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Format: 00:00–01:32
• Sarah Edwards: Technology and Privacy: 01:32–11:11
• Sarah Richmond: Respect and Privacy Beyond Consequences: 11:17–21:16
• Roger Brownsworth: Law, Regulation, and the Risks of Social Control: 21:50–43:27
• Panel Q&A: Regulatory Models, Overhyped Technology, Reasonable Expectations: 43:27–55:08
• Audience Q&A: Determinism, Voluntary Exposure, Biocryptography, Social Media, Children's Rights: 61:27–93:53

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Conclusion and Takeaways

The panel underscores that cognitive neuroscience—like other emergent technologies—raises especially acute privacy questions because the brain is seen as the seat of personhood and agency. While neurotechnologies are not yet capable of true “mind-reading”, hype, expanding access, and social/cultural attitudes all shape policy needs. Law, ethics, and regulation must grapple with the uniqueness (or lack thereof) of brain data, the problems of meaningful consent, risks of over-surveillance, and the deep psychological/social needs for privacy and respect.

Ongoing public engagement, realistic appraisal of both risks and likely benefits, and a focus on respect for persons—not just instrumental outcomes—are vital for the future.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome everybody. Hello and again, welcome to the forum for European Philosophy Consilience panel discussion. And this is our session on the ethics of cognitive sciences. My name is Bahadur Bahrami from University College London and I'm very honored here to be with Sarah Edwards, Sarah Richmond and Roger Brownsworth with you, hopefully having this interesting discussion today. The topic is going to be the ethics of cognitive sciences, privacy and respect for persons. So I will just skip the standard introduction because I just assume that if you are here with this very specific topic, you have already read what it is about and you are not here by accident. So I'll just tell you that the way this will work is that we will have 10 minute presentations by each of the speakers. First starting with Ms. Edwards and then going to Ms. Richmond and then from there to Professor Brown and Brownsworth. And then after that first 30 minutes we will have panel discussions for another 30 minutes questions between the panel members and the final half hour or maybe earlier we will go for questions from the audience. So without further ado, I'll just start with you, please.

[B]

Thank you very much. As you all know, cognitive science uses the full range of different scientific methods, from simple structured questionnaires through to the use of very advanced high resolution imaging equipment. But they all seem to share the same objective, and that is to discover facts about the mind, how it represents the world and how it reasons. And these methods are largely unavailable to people in sort of everyday folk encounters. So there's something special about the methods we're using to uncover these facts. But simply because these methods aren't widely available to the laity, it raises all sorts of difficult questions, one of which of course, is privacy. Before we can pass judgment on how best to protect our privacy interests in scanning particularly, there are several questions that it's important to ask and think about. For example, is there anything special about the brain and about brain images? We often think of the brain as being the seat of our souls, the source of all value, of our creativity and of our mental freedom. Is it our inner sanctum that is out of bounds for science? What can brain scanning equipment actually do? We might be thinking of possible future worlds that are at the moment fictional. We think of the brave new world of remote scanning by the state of the thought police. But there are important theoretical and practical limitations of physics and of biology on what these technologies might be able to do, even with a lot of research and technological advance. We have PET scans, positron emission tomography that require ionizing substances to be injected into a person before they can be scanned. Then we have eeg, or electronic encephalography, which at the moment isn't terribly.

[C]

Well.

[B]

Detailed in its scanning. It gives low resolution information of a quite crude nature. And then we have functional MRI scans, which are of course, limited by the fact that at the moment, they're very large, they're cumbersome, and largely confined to medical environments. Theoretically, a magnetic field would have to be confined. Now, we could imagine a magnetic field in a room or a corridor that would be physically confined enough to make such scanning useful and feasible. But within these inherent limitations of technology, the sorts of experiments that we see to date have involved setting predefined choices and following single thought processes to capture what people are thinking in one instant. How these thoughts are put together and how we might capture multiple thoughts from one source remains elusive. Now, the sort of environment that we see these scanners, we might think is wholly restricted to medical environments. But this isn't. So we've been hearing just before we came in that there's now an Android app that allows you to scan your own brain to some extent. And for quite a while, we've been able to hire out EEG equipment of a very crude nature just to tell us whether our right or our left brain is working more so than the other. The availability of this sort of technology, we might find, is crucial to how we think about questions of privacy. Following one of the legal cases in the United States which proved a challenge for their fourth amendment designed to protect a citizen from unless wanted and unwarranted stop and searches by the police, we see the case of Kilo, who was initially convicted of growing marijuana in his house. The waste heat had been detected coming out of some hole in his premises, and this was detected by the police using thermal imaging technology. His conviction was overturned on appeal on grounds that this thermal imaging technology wasn't widely available. At some point it might be, in which case the grounds for that appeal would have disappeared. But this leads us onto ideas of consent. In this case, of course, consent hadn't been sought and a violation of privacy was seen simply because consent hadn't been sought. But even when consent is granted, would that be a sufficient measure to protect a person's privacy? Might we have reasonable expectations of privacy even if we're in the public environment? If we're in a public pay phone, might we have a reasonable expectation that there wouldn't be eavesdropping devices attached round the back? And are we ready to give up some of these rights? We've been hearing again before we came in that on some occasions, yes, we seem to be very ready to give up these rights in exchange for material goods of one sort or another. But then there are questions that we see which seem to threaten our ability to give consent. And this is a general problem with research where people think that they have a therapeutic benefit to a scan, for example, whereas in fact these may be used for completely non therapeutic purposes and may actually be used for purposes that are damaging to the person's interests. And images being images, they reveal lots more than perhaps we would anticipate at first. We might find that images provide unwanted and incidental findings that can't be erased once the image is out there. But while we might be ready to give up some of these rights to privacy once they're used for ill purpose, then we can be sure that someone will object. We have on the horizon questions of biofeedback. We might be able to use these in images for our own good, but then they could be used for research and accessible by third parties. And currently we know that such uses are regarded as compatible with the original theoretical use for the images. But it'd be wise to think about how technology will advance in the future, given some of the limitations of physics and of biology, so that we don't just sleepwalk into some of these fictional scenarios. We might be all thinking about.

[D]

Where.

[B]

Scanning becomes routine and where our minds are more or less transparent.

[D]

Excellent.

[A]

So yes, please.

[C]

Thank you. Okay. I'm Sarah Richmond and, and I teach philosophy at ucl and I think this is an excellent moment to plug a book which Sarah Edwards and myself with Geraint Rees, the three of us co edited it and it includes, it's on just the topic of this evening and it includes actually essays by all three speakers. So I did want to make sure everybody was aware of this book. It came out last year with the title which has been criticized. Actually a reviewer was quite harsh about it saying we thought it was quite an attention grabbing title. I know what you're thinking, but it did get criticized on the grounds that it was far too sensationalist, that, you know, we were far from being able to tell what people are thinking with this technology and therefore it was sort of overselling things. And actually that's one of the things I wanted to make a brief comment about this idea that perhaps there's a lot of hype in this area and that we need to maybe calm down a little bit before we over sensationalize it. And I think it's more distinctive in the kinds of questions that it raises than it is. But the first remark I wanted to make was in the title of tonight's panel, We've got the word privacy, Respect, as well as the word privacy. And I think this notion of respect is an important notion that we need to hang onto in this discussion. Because very frequently what people start worrying about are particular gains or losses that might come about if some specific piece of information is no longer within their control or is made public. But that doesn't exhaust the question of why people might care about their privacy and in particular, might attach importance to information about their brain processes. So one author who's written in this area made the point, I thought quite well by reminding us of the character of Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, who I'm sure all of you will remember when Higgins, Professor Higgins, is out recording her and marveling at her accent and making notes and so on, she responds to him very angrily. And one of the things she says is, I ain't done nothing wrong. Now, that objection is the obvious kind of worry that there might be something in the information that would cause you harm if it were made public. But of course, that worry, I ain't done nothing wrong, isn't the only worry that people have about incursions into their privacy. I think a more fundamental worry is something to do with the attitude of respect. So it's not a worry about what will be done with the information. It's a worry about this information is my business. It doesn't have to be damaging to me or damage my reputation. It's just my business, and it therefore should be respected as such. So the other response that Eliza Doolittle or the bystanders make is, what are you staring at? And that, I think, comes closer to what we have in mind when we're talking about an attitude of respect. It's not, I don't want you to find this out, but I don't want you to have that attitude towards me. That's not an attitude you're entitled to have, at least not without my consent. And another way in which the same point can be illustrated, if you think of an ornithologist watching the behavior of magpies or something out in the fields, nobody would say, say that there was some objection to his or her doing that on behalf of the magpies, as it were. Birds, we don't. Birds don't care about their privacy. We have no reason to think birds care about their privacy, but we do. So the minute this ornithologist turns her binoculars onto us. Whatever we're doing, we do have this tendency to respond, what are you staring at? And I think that's an important point. So the danger, if we don't bear that in mind, is that we're only going to think in consequentialist terms. And I think that that is a mistake. Now, in the paper I wrote in this book, I tried to think about how things might be, if really it did become possible, via brain imaging technology, for people to know what we were thinking or what was going on in our minds. Because, after all, at the moment, by and large, our minds are not accessible to other people. Of course, we give ourselves away some of the time involuntarily by blushing or whatever, but we do tend to think that a lot of the thoughts that go through our minds are not accessible to others unless we wish to publicize them. So the question I tried to think about was, well, supposing somehow they did become accessible to others, how would that be? And what I ended up thinking was that it is such a counterfactual possibility that we really probably have no idea how things would be, because so much would change the minute that really was a reality. The kind of thought experiment made me think of Judith Jarvis Thompson's very famous thought experiment. In her paper, her classic paper about abortion, she said, imagine how it would be if instead of people reproducing in the way they currently reproduce, instead of that people grew out of seeds. And if a people's seed flew in through your window and implanted itself, let's say, in your carpet, then it would grow ultimately into a person. Imagine if that's the way people reproduced. And she then tried to follow up this analogy and say, would we force people to go on nurturing these people seeds, even if they'd taken every possible measure they could to put mesh on their windows and try and stop these people seeds getting in. And of course, that was supposed to be roughly an analogy to somebody who'd tried hard, responsibly, to use contraceptive techniques but found themselves unwillingly pregnant. Well, this is a mad thought experiment, because if people really did reproduce by way of growing in your carpet from seeds, so many other aspects of our social arrangements would be different anyway, that I think it's somewhat odd to think that we can seriously think about this possibility. So I did want to issue a note of sort of caution, which isn't something philosophers are very prone to, about this particular line of thought. How would it be if our minds were somehow transparent to others? So that's putting aside all the worries about whether we're actually anywhere near achieving it in practical terms. So that's something that neuroscientists might be able to tell us. Something about, how much longer have I got? Or have I run out?

[A]

No, you've got another two or three minutes.

[C]

I've got another two or three minutes. I'd just like to raise one more thing that in connection with this thought experiment. So what's often cited, of course, in connection with this worry about mental transparency is the vulnerability that we all feel in relation to, as it were, our public Persona. We control it very carefully. There's all kinds of things we would say. Say in public that we wouldn't say in private and so on. So how would it be if that line began to be eroded? And again, our instinct is perhaps to think that it's terrible. And as I've said, I think in very serious ways. It's difficult for us to talk about this question at all. But one point I did want to make is that people see the costs very readily, because what we all think about is our investment, hiding things from others. But it did occur to me that a great many of the things we hide from other people and we might be ashamed of are actually things we might not really need to be ashamed of. We might be misreading the way in which other people might react if they knew some of this information. So it could be, indeed, I'm thinking of a sort of very large magnification of something like a group therapy session where people end up saying to each other, you were worried about that.

[D]

Why were you worried about that?

[C]

I'm just the same. It could be that actually there were some benefits, too, about a situation in which we were less able than we currently are to keep things to ourselves because at some level we're ashamed of them. And so I just wanted to raise this question of shame as well, in relation to privacy, because they're obviously very clear, closely interconnected. So I'll leave it there.

[A]

Okay. Thank you so much, Sarah. So I think we'll just carry on with Roger.

[D]

I'm sorry if we can't. It's very difficult for me to peer around this lectern, so I'm afraid it'll have to be audio only if you bear with me.

[C]

Do you want to change places?

[D]

I can do. If you wish. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, thanks.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Okay. Okay. So we are. Thanks very much. Well, just to explain where I come from on this, I got interested quite a few years ago in the way law and regulation more generally deals with emerging technologies. And by the time I became interested in this information technology and biotechnologies, both human genetics and agricultural biotech were the two big streams of technology that were of real interest. And the difficulties of trying to wrap regulatory frameworks, get the right kind of regulatory environment for these technologies was what was interesting me. But as I was working on trying to think about the regulatory environment for these two streams of technology, first of all nanotechnologies, and then NAN neurotechnologies became really hot topics for discussion. The sense was that there were rapid technological developments going on in these two streams. And so that's the way in which I came to be interested, among other things, in neurotechnologies and the problems they pose for us in thinking about how to regulate them. So I'm going to just try to introduce this by talking to three issues, really quite large issues, but first of all, to say something about how I think the discourse or the debates about emerging technologies goes. The kind of concerns that people have, privacy is somewhere in the mix there, but it's not the only kind of concern. And then secondly, I'll say something about privacy. Sarah Richmond's already prefigured quite a bit of what I want to say about this, but nevertheless, I'll say it again, which is how seriously we take privacy or not. And then I'll say something about dignity. And the reason for this being that in Europe, without noticing actually, we have committed ourselves to human dignity as being perhaps the overriding value after the Treaty of Lisbon. This dignity is right there at the top of the list. And it's a value that doesn't really resonate terrifically strongly in the uk, unlike across the water in continental Europe. So I'll say something about, on the one hand, the skepticism I have about rather conservative dignitarian views, but on the other hand, a view which is digressing a little bit, but a view that is saying, look, there is something here that is profoundly important about the way we order our societies and how this plays for both law, ethics and religion in the future. So first of all, what does the landscape look like? Well, broadly speaking, where new technologies of any of the streams I've talked about appear, where money is to be made out of these technologies, and where there is research interest in these technologies, there will be a lobby, of course, that is saying, be very careful about the way you regulate here. Don't over regulate. Don't kill the technology by over regulating. Okay, so there are people who are just Technophiles who want the field clear of regulation. And, you know, just if we come, if there are problems that arise, then, you know, we'll deal with them as and when. Don't try and anticipate too many problems and regulate unnecessarily. And of course, information, I say information technology, largely developed in an environment that was very, very lightly regulated indeed, and of course is delivered rapid penetration of technologies that now just, you know, are embedded in our everyday lives in the way that the other technologies are not yet embedded. So you've got that constituency, but against that you have three strong voices, I would say, speaking out and saying, be careful with these technologies. We've already heard from Sarah Edwards, you know, that we need to think hard about where we're going with these technologies. One set of concerns is a concern about the risks that they present. Are they dangerous? Are they going to kill us? I mean, worries about, for example, synthetic biology. Some people would say we should never let that out of the laboratory. Even in the laboratory, it's too dangerous. You know, there are technologies that could kill us. They could be catastrophic. We need to regulate those. I mean, the regulation might be prohibit them, but if you're not going to prohibit it, at least make sure that it doesn't have the catastrophic effects that you fear it could be to our human health and safety or to the environment. So there's a concerns there. Some technologies, like biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, elicit those kind of concerns far more than information technology. You don't hear people worrying that information technology is going to kill us. I must say that emailing is almost killing me. But, you know, information technology doesn't come with that kind of health warning generally. The second sort of concern we have is that these technologies should be developed and applied in ways that are compatible with human rights. Human rights needs to be respected. And this is where people tap into their concerns about privacy. And information technology has at all times, or any kind of surveillance technologies just provoke this concern straight away. You know the slogans about the surveillance society, our concerns about what's happening to privacy in communities that go strong on these technologies in their public ordering. The third sort of concern is, as I say, about human dignity, because people would say that whatever happens with these technologies, it shouldn't be allowed to compromise human dignities. Many of these technologies are now being talked about in a way that would enhance human capabilities. And in these enhancement debates all the time, you've got a conservative group over here saying, be very careful. Well, not be very careful. No, categorically, no. We shouldn't be doing this. Michael Sandel, I don't know if you know Michael Sandel's work. He's a very eloquent spokesman for this sort of perspective, is saying, from a communitarian point of view, we just don't want this kind of stuff here. The market corrupts and these technologies of perfection will corrupt us as well. So these are the three concerns about acceptable risks, about human rights and about human dignity. And against that, all the time you've got people saying on the other side, ah, but don't over regulate. Don't, you know, think about the chill factor, don't kill the technology. So that's the background. And from time to time, you do have huge hotspots where these issues come to a head. For example, in the European Court of Justice, not very long ago, there was a huge patenting case called Bruce Lee, where the state of the art stem cell research by a German neuroscientist who was trying to develop stem cell responses to Parkinson's disease was ruled to be unpatentable by the European Court of Justice, applying a European directive from 1998. Well, quite a simple reason that Bruce Lee's research seemed necessarily to involve the destruction of human embryos. His materials were derived from human embryos. And embryo protection is one of the first golden rules, really, of the dignitarian. So that's the general landscape now. Turning to privacy. We've already heard tonight some questions about just how seriously we do take privacy. Are people ready to forgo their privacy, to give it away, and so on. Here are four ways in which you might test out how strongly you are actually committed to privacy. Four benchmarks for the strength of your privacy commitment. Number one is the point that Sarah Richmond's already put on the table, which is, do you think of privacy, I would say, as being akin to property in the sense. I mean, if I've got. If there's a part of the building here that says private on the door, then that is telling me I shouldn't go in. And maybe, you know, I have private on my forehead, which is saying he shouldn't go in there either. And it's the attempt to access or the accessing of a private area that is a wrong per se. Like trespassers are wrong per se. Often the wrong will be accompanied by consequential losses, detriment to the individual. I mean, if someone interrogates my brain and is able to read off some indicators that suggest I'm a bad risk for employers, or insurers, rightly or wrongly. And employers and insurers then mark me up as high risk. I'm damaged. And we might often think that what's wrong with privacy is this downstream. Sorry. What we worry about is this consequential downstream loss or damage. But the question is, is that really what privacy is about? Or is the real wrong of privacy upstream with the initial attempt to access something that is truly private, just my business? That's the. Okay, so that's the first question or the first benchmark. The second benchmark is. Well, it really comes from the jurisprudence. I think, again, we've heard this already tonight, that in the 1960s, in a big U.S. supreme case called Katz K A TZ, the U.S. supreme Court said that it wasn't enough for an individual to expect a zone to be private, in this case a public phone booth. This had to be accompanied by a reasonable expectation of privacy. Okay, it wasn't enough that you subjectively thought this should be private. This had to be also accompanied by a reasonable expectation, which of course then invites the question, by whose standards? And do we determine whether or not this is reasonable? And as the law has developed and as the technologies have rolled out, I think that reasonableness is judged by reference to what is common practice. So, I mean, I always say, you know, if you do a Google search for any of us here on the panel, you'll find all sorts of stuff up there that we haven't personally authorized or approved. But if we were to say, oh, well, this is a violation of my privacy, we wouldn't have a prayer, because, you know, everybody Googles everybody. I mean, this is just commonplace. And so if you want to take a stand against this, you've got to say the reasonable sum of expectations. And it's not to be determined simply by what just goes out there. What is the norm, as it were, because the norm drifts in ways that erode the protections that you once might have had. It's like a tide that is going out and leaving you more exposed and in an exposed place, you say, oh, but what about my privacy? I'm sorry, the world has changed, the context changed. Your expectation is no longer reasonable. So if you think that reasonable expectations is a good test and you want to stabilize and defend the concept of privacy, then you have to find some, you know, some other way of, some other criterion for the reasonableness of this expectation. What is it? I think we had the question earlier on again from Sarah Edwards. Is the brain something special? Is there something special about the brain? Something Special that we want to try to defend through our concept of privacy, our privacy rights. A third indicator of how seriously we take privacy is how hard we make it for individuals who have privacy rights to be taken, to have consented, to have authorized acts which would infringe, which are going to infringe their privacy. How easy is it? Well, so often we are put in positions, for example, when people are talking about data protection, which is not strictly speaking privacy, but it's kind of in the same box. If you're ever in a building society or some place where they're going to read you your data protection position, I mean, they read it out to you as fast as I can go talking at you now. And there will probably be something in there saying, you can opt out from this if you wish, but you don't hear it. I mean, it just whizzes past you and you're taken to have consented to the onward transmission of this information and they've done their data protection due diligence by reading this out to you. I mean, it really is very casual indeed. The way you get consented in hospitals, in clinical situations is again, an example of how easy it is for people to be taken to have consented. And of course, having consented, then you at least can't complain that anybody's doing you a wrong. So how hard are we going to make it for people to consent to an act which would otherwise violate their privacy? In the, the case of property, we make consent quite difficult. You know, we're not opting out. And if privacy is to be treated in a way that is analogous to property, then you would make it quite tough for people to give a consent. You would say the signaling of consent really has to be pretty explicit. You opt in, not opt out, anything like that. Okay. Or again, these fictions that, well, we don't really need to bother asking this person because we know they would have consented had they been asked. You're weakening the requirements all the time. Implied consent. No, I don't think so. So where do you stand on that? How tough do you want to make it for people to give away their privacy by consenting? And then a fourth indicator of how seriously you take privacy is where you see it as standing in the rank ordering of rights or values. I mean, presumably life is at the top of that rank, rank ordering. But where does privacy stand? We have, we have problems where privacy is in competition with freedom of expression. We know it's in the same sort of zone there and different legal systems around the world strike the balance in different ways, but we think we're in the same zone. Do we think privacy, though, again, to go back to property, is ranking as high as property, or would we think property tends to outrank privacy? I mean, again, I don't think we have any clear answers to these questions, but you might, you know, as you're pondering on the importance of privacy, just see how it fares for you against those kind of benchmarks. And then thirdly, I'll just try and deal with this quite quickly. But for me, as a lawyer, the most worrying aspect of all this is that, Yes, is that where communities have moral aspirations and all those who contest the notion of human dignity or human rights do have moral aspirations, I think that the lowest common ground between the protagonists is that they all agree it's important for people to try to do the right thing and moreover to do the right thing for the right reason. Now, you can only do the right thing for the right reason if you have some freedom to do the thing you're doing and you have options available to you. So, I mean, as it were, you can only be a good person or do the right thing if you could have done the wrong thing. Now, these technologies that we are discussing mainly tonight, and mainly appearing in clinical or research medical contexts and settings are potentially usable by regulators who are seeing them as tools to channel the way people behave. In other words, they can be utilized as instruments of social control. Much that starts with good intentions in the world of medicine and health can become potent instrument within the criminal justice system or some analogous system of control. We already see this with DNA profiling, with cctv, with various tracking and monitoring technologies that are being utilized as part of the regulatory apparatus. And the significance of this for communities, as I say, with moral aspirations is that this can impede the attempts of individuals to do the right thing for the right reason. This can create a regulatory environment that is not at all congenial to the setting that moral communities need to have for them to flourish. And it can happen in two stages. So the first stage is that the technologies are employed in ways that, and this is surveillance technology, especially, we can see you doing this. So if you deviate, if you don't comply, you will be detected, and having been detected, you will be punished. Now, the message or the signal behind CCTV or DNA profiling is we're going to get you. This gives you prudential reasons for staying in line. Just look at the way motorists drive through those parts of the road that are monitored by Speed cameras, you know, they're not doing the right thing there. They're looking after their own skins. They don't want to have penalty points on their licenses. Those drivers, okay, they'll accelerate as soon as they're out of the zone. That's being subject to surveillance. Okay, but these signals that we get from these surveillance technologies and even future imaging technologies are part of the surveillance apparatus. Then the message is you should do this because it's in your own interest. Don't do noble about this. If you want to avoid punishment, stay in line, because these technologies are going to get you otherwise. Okay, so that's the first stage. But the second stage of these technologies impacting on the way we order our societies is to go. So it's one stage further. It's now to exclude by technological management the options that are available to you, practically available to you. You see this in online environments all the time. These are very, very heavily managed environments, technologically managed. You don't need to have rules and regulations so much in online environments because the technology can simply fix things in a way that you can't get in. I mean, if you've lost your password or whatever it is, you know, you just can't get into this, into this, through this door. And that model, I think, is likely to be copied across into what remains of our offline worlds. So that technologies are used, whether they're neurotechnologies or nano bio info technologies, robotics, I mean, a whole, whatever technologies there are, are going to be deployed in ways that manage these environments. So where we are in these environments, we only have certain options available to us, the options that the regulators are willing for us to have. And if the regulators are morally minded, they'll have a certain moral script for us. And they will set these environments in a way that we can only do the right thing relative to their moral standards. Okay? And of course, in doing this, there's no virtue in doing this, no virtue whatsoever. Because in doing the right thing, we're not doing it freely, we're not doing it for the right reason. There's a great piece by a Canadian regulatory theorist called Ian Kerr, who talks about various technologies that are embedded in various kinds of carts, starting with supermarket trolleys. Supermarkets lose lots of their trolleys. People wheel them away. You can have as many rules and signs saying that this will be punished, this will be penalized, but people will still wheel the trolleys away until you fit them out with GPS technologies. That means that once you get to a certain point in, they will not go any further, so you can't trolley them away. Similarly, Ian talks about an experience he had on a golf course where he's on a golf cart approaching the green. And at the golf course, they don't want you to take the cart onto the green. But again, the cart is engineered in a way that the technology prevents you taking it onto the green. It just is immobilized. When you get to a point where you look as though you might be approaching the green, there's no virtue at all. There's no respect. There's no respect there. Although your conduct is respectful in appearance, you don't actually respect others. Okay. It's right. We say about robots, you know, Sherry Turkle says, robots, yes, they can care, but they can care for us, but they don't care about us. That you can have the performance through the technology, but you don't really have what we think is essential in moral communities in our relationships with one another. So if we are worried about the perspectives of moral communities in the sense of people doing the right thing for the right reason, then we need to worry about technologies like brain imaging or neuroimaging, which at this stage are largely in, I think, the medical domain and research domain, but which could then translate across into the general community as ordering devices. And, I mean, Colin Blakemore says, well, you know, you're obsessive about this. Why does it matter matter if people do the right thing, why they actually do it? All that matters is that they do the right thing. But if you understand the moral community in the way I've described it, and the ideal typical performance is that you make up your mind, what's the right thing to do, you freely do it. Then for that reason, then I'm afraid that doing what someone else thinks is the right thing isn't the same thing at all. And doing it where you don't have any other options definitely isn't the same thing at all. So as a lawyer, I worry about this. I think as ethicists, we ought to worry about this because this is going way beyond the impingement of these technologies on privacy. This is a scenario where these technologies take over as regulatory instruments and squeeze out the traditional regulatory instruments that we've had, which are law and ethics.

[A]

Thank you so much. That was very, very interesting. So I guess now we will proceed to questions and answers between the panel members. So I'll just. If there's any points that you want to raise and discuss, please feel free. Oh, yeah, sure.

[D]

There you are. There you are.

[A]

So maybe, perhaps I could start with my question. My background is in empirical neuroscience, so I'm quite newcomer to this whole discussion. That's partially why I participated and also have been reading the book. So my question was if, like, when we think about these issues, one thing that comes to mind generally is that we all have these fears of how things may go wrong if we get the ethical issues and the regulatory issues wrongly. And perhaps the best example is the information technology and how it. It started with very little regulation and now it seems to be out of hands with how much of, like, penetration there is into everybody's personal information. So is there any successful previous case of anything similar in history where we could say that you have dealt with successfully, have raised the ethical issues in time before the technology took over? And we have actually, by the time it became part of our lives, we could more or less be proud of what we did. Is there any case that by looking at, we can kind of go, okay, we did it once before, now we are going to do this once again and follow the same kind of idea and hopefully by the time brain scanning becomes as available as cell phones, then we will be fine?

[D]

Well, I think an obvious example of that and the possible model is the way that in the UK we came to regulate IVF. We had the Warnock Committee set up in 1984, 85, and they spent several years deliberating. I think it was a royal commission. So they must have had broad consultation on this question. I mean, this was hugely controversial at the time. The assisted conception was highly problematic. And Warnock made then those recommendations, which took four years or so in Parliament before the politicians got the Human Fertilization Embryology act on the statute book. In 1990, the main problem in Parliament was that, well, a lot of politicians were again worried about the use of human embryos for research. That was the big sticking point. But they got the legislative framework in place. They had the HFEA as a regulatory authority. And although the HFEA has had a rocky time over the years, I think many people would point to this and say, well, this is at least one plausible way of trying to handle these emerging technologies. It's not going to be done in a secretive way. It's going to be transparent and it's going to be done in a way that, I mean, people talk about a social license for these technologies. You could plausibly say that assisted conception had a social license because it was so broadly debated and had the benefit of the Warnock Committee's expert deliberations to, you know, to focus the issues. That's not to say that everybody in the UK would have been happy with the outcome, but I think that this was, you know, clinics were licensed and people knew where IVF was available. And saying reproductive cloning, on the other hand, was something that, you know, we're not able to do anyway. But I don't think anyone. Someone's doing it somewhere in the world I don't know about. But when there was a possibility that that should happen. There seemed to be broad public support for prohibition. People were very worried about this, whether rightly or wrongly, but they were. And Parliament put a prohibition in place very quickly on that one. The legislation went through Parliament, I think, in under two weeks, which was almost in the Guinness Book of Records.

[C]

I suppose one thought your question, one very obvious thought it raises, is about the limits of a particular state anyway, trying to regulate many modern developments. So even with assisted conception, the rules, as everyone knows, are quite a bit laxer in the United States than they are here. So we have had people traveling abroad in order to pay surrogate mothers and so on. So I'm just wondering, I mean, this is a question, not really a reply, but whether we feel that, you know, perhaps pessimistic until we have more sense of global cooperation about the chances of regulating some of these things to our satisfaction.

[B]

And it's not clear to me what sorts of lessons we might learn from looking at those sorts of technologies. I mean, privacy seems to me to be so very different from assisted conception. When you're bringing another life into the world and we've got so many technologies that are already out there that threaten.

[E]

Privacy.

[B]

It would be very difficult even now to stem that tide. So quite, you know, what we'd be able to do with even specific regulation of neuroscience now is hard to tell, but I think it might. Do you feel that it might be worth emphasizing sort of the methods we might use to collect brain scans or sort of mental information, as opposed to the content of that information? I think we run the risk of underestimating our capabilities of reading others. I mean, yes, the more we get to know our friends, the more we can predict what they're going to do, their preferences, whether they might want a coffee in the morning. We don't necessarily ask their consent necessarily. We just go ahead and buy it. And a very surprised when they decided they wanted tea that day. And perhaps we're also sort of overestimating what the methods that cognitive science currently has to offer might yield. Is it an extension of what we already do or Is there something sort of brand new about neuroscience? I think that I would want to press the regulators on to see whether we need to be very worried now.

[D]

Okay, well, I think you could say at the moment, particularly the more high level imaging is going on in very much controlled environments where we have the possibility of regular. I mean, it's not as though people in clinical or research settings are going in, they're not being coerced or duped into, they're giving informed consent. So you might think, well, everything's fine. And in a sense these are like places that are licensed to do this work. We're satisfied that the imaging equipment by and large is not dangerous. I mean, it's not going to kill people. But what if imaging kits became more widely available, much cheaper, more widely distributed and, and then kind of cuts out of the bag because how it's like with DNA profiling, really with sequencing. I mean, you know, once upon a time you might say the only place where this would have gone on would have been in very controlled environments. And now, you know, you can, it's commercially exploitable and people are getting this kind of information online.

[B]

I mean, if we elicit people's preferences in any other way. So we might have, you know, preferences.

[A]

About.

[B]

Tea or coffee, for example. Yes. We might be able to sort of spot somebody's eye looking towards, you know, the coffee machine. We may not need to have, you know, neuroscience. And if we did have a ready made EEG equipment to hand, it might not give us any more information than we'd be able to glean through other methods. So might we want to sort of look at the sorts of things that this technology would tap into as much as the methods and the hype that we have over the Wizi technology as it is?

[D]

Yeah. Sarah, as you're saying that, I'm thinking about similar sort of story, I think with genetics, where initially the thought was that the information derived by geneticists would be hugely important for say insurers or employers and maybe even in the criminal justice system too. And then in the early days of imaging you think, oh well, gosh, this is going to be dynamite for insurers or employers. But then perhaps it turns out it's not just like for time. Genetics hasn't seemed to have, you know, insurers and employers can find out what they need to know about people in other ways and there's no real added value. So whether you need to regulate that, I'm not sure. Well, because commercial people will make their own commercial judgments fairly quickly and realize that this actually isn't going to help them so they lose interest in it. But I mean, there could certainly be informal codes that would help employers or insurers develop sensible practices. I would say again, you know, one of the some years ago was a guy called David Collingridge who gave his name to a dilemma which is that with all these technologies in the early days, we don't really know what the problems are. By the time we've got the profile of technology pretty clearly in focus and know what we need to regulate, it's too late because they now either have great commercial value, which people aren't prepared to back off, or, you know, but.

[C]

Also, I think the point you made about the definition of a reasonable expectation is also going to change. So there's another sense in which it's going to be too late. Or with hindsight we might think that.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I'm very critical about the way that we've utilized privacy as a convenient kind of pay whenever we have a very broad range of concerns. If you see the way the privacy has been, you know, exploited in different jurisprudence around the world. I mean, after all, you know, in US Jurisprudence, privacy, although it doesn't appear in the US Constitution, is actually at the basis of, you know, the pro choice position in Roe and Wade and, you know, in the big abortion case. And you think, well, what's actually, what has that got to do with privacy? And there's privacy in relation to land and real estate and there's privacy in relation to information. And here it's the informational privacy that we're trying to grapple with, but it's nestling alongside data protection and confidentiality. And I think we're quite muddled in the way we think about these different interests we have. You know, if privacy really, really matters to us in a way that we can just say, look, this is my business, just back off. It's nothing to do with you. It's wrong for you even to try to access this. Then what kind of information is it that could attract such a strong protection? So I can just say, I don't care how beneficial it is to you or how non detrimental it is to me, it's mine. Just like I can say about a piece of, you know, like a book that I happen to, you might say, I'd love to read this Suppose this World. So I'd love to read this book. And I said, really should. Yeah, you should, Yeah. I say, I'm sorry, it's mine. And you said, but you're not reading it, or you've already read it, you've no use for it, it's irrelevant, it's mine. I can just say, you know, in those terms, M is property. And if privacy is analogous, then I can just say, look, this information, it's none of your business, it's mine. But what sort of information would it be that would be of that order? I mean, and it is information that is, as in imaging, showing you something about, you know, the functioning of the brain. But I'm not sure that it's telling us anything about the mental life of those agents, you know.

[A]

Yeah, I was actually in relation to both of these matters, I was reminded of a case that is not a particular. Like, it's something that you see if you practice psychiatry a lot. And I'm bringing up this story because it relates to how, for example, a mind reading technology may actually change the way we think about and the way things happen around us in relation to what Sarah was saying about, like, when and if we have new technologies, then many, many different things will change in unpredictable way. One thing that you see in schizophrenia patients a lot is the symptom that we call idea of broadcast. So a lot of schizophrenic patients believe that their thoughts are being broadcast from TV or radio. A lot of them think that everybody knows what is happening in their head all the time. Particularly the case with TV is very relevant for them. Like a lot of them do report that they think, well, TV is talking about what I'm thinking about right now. I had this specific patient who thought or was convinced that a famous rocket star, English rock star, with whom he had been friends. I don't know if it was right or not, but back when they were in college, had implanted a device in his head and would steal all the musical ideas that would come to his head and generate his new albums and get a lot of money out of them. Now, for us, for me, when I was a medical student, this was a completely mad idea with all sorts of things that you would say, okay, this is a perfect case of psychosis. Now, in 20 years time, can you say that this is a case of psychosis? Can you actually then perhaps use this kind of information or this kind of argument to section a person and say that this person is not capable of or is going through a major psychotic delusion and therefore not capable of, like holding on to his property, for example. So what I was saying is that when the new technology, if the new technology gets to that stage of being able to broadcast Your thoughts, then things will be different because a lot of people who you may act normally right now consider mad, may actually now turn into just normal people.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think in a way, these. These phenomena, possibly we should react to them as that they show us, actually that these issues do matter to us, us hugely. So rather than sort of thinking these are pathological people and there's absolutely no reason why we should take their concerns seriously. I think often it's actually truer that they're just an extreme case with their concerns showing us concerns that everybody might have, but not quite. Extremely. And so while you were talking, the first thing I thought of was paranoia. I mean, so sometimes when people react to CCTV cameras and they get very, very worked up about it, they're accused of being paranoid. But actually, maybe we should turn it round and think these reactions are telling us something. We may not be very good at conceptualizing why they matter to us, but they're telling us that these things do matter to us.

[B]

And presumably the patient wasn't very happy.

[A]

No, definitely not. Definitely not. He thought all the money should go to him. I think we can start getting questions from the audience as well. Yes, please.

[F]

I'm just worried that the things we're talking about tonight have involved a deliberate philosophical choice, a deterministic choice that doesn't necessarily need to be made. I mean, and we're already seeing it in company profiling certain customers about whether they should pay more for their insurance, whether they've got a bad credit rating, as if there's a definitive link between the two. I'm sorry that this is resting on a philosophy that isn't necessarily even proven within philosophy, that the debate's still there and that we're making too many assumptions that determinism has a lot going for it that it doesn't really deserve. That's my major problem. Are we giving determinism far too much credit in this technology?

[A]

Sam, do you want.

[C]

Can you say a bit more about how determinism.

[F]

Well, in things like it's going to cost me more to have car insurance if I've had a bad credit rating in the past because they see me as an unreliable person, that there's a deterministic link between the two, and this deterministic link is costing me. It's not. This is a hypothetical case, but would be costing me a lot of money now, that rests on us accepting that there are deterministic things between these two, things that I don't necessarily have been proven even within philosophy. It's Still a huge debate.

[B]

Well, I don't think it's inevitable that technology will advance in the ways we've been talking about. These are some of the possible scenarios that I think we'd be wise to think about now before it's too late. I mean, we're now in a position where we can shape how we want technology to advance. Roger was talking about finding a community, people who might regulate emerging technologies in a way that society would agree with.

[F]

Do you not think we've already got this sort of deterministic choice in place, that we're making decisions, that this is necessarily linked to that whatsoever?

[D]

I think you see this, We've seen this with genetics, and I think you do see it with imaging to some extent as well, in the sense of. Sense that information about an individual suggests that they're likely, they have a predisposition. I mean, I think with mental health or, you know, dementia, that I think the images will feel that they could detect early signs of some of these conditions, which in a medical context, you could say, well, that's, that's good because maybe an early diagnosis means that you can delay the onset of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or dementia, whatever. But if we're worried about insurance companies or employers then calculating, making risk assessments, I don't think this means they're committed to philosophical determinism. It just means they think that the likelihood of a certain condition eventuating is more, is increased by the information they now have. But of course you could.

[F]

You mean that is deterministic? That sounds deterministic to me.

[D]

No, I think it's like. I mean, I think likelihood is, you know, all the time. We have to determine whether something is more likely than not. And it doesn't. I mean, it's only if you've got a probability of one that I think you would say this is definitely going to happen and that this is causing it. But, I mean, I think I can understand where you're coming from in the sense that so much of the science here does seem to be about profiling individuals, saying this is your future and actually, whether you like it or not, you're trapped in this.

[F]

But no comeback. Yeah, that's the problem. You can't say you're wrong here.

[D]

No.

[F]

They're making decisions before they've even happened.

[D]

Well, yeah, but I would like, if.

[A]

I were to, to defend it. It's the science part of it.

[F]

In this case.

[A]

There are very few.

[D]

Claims.

[A]

Very few people. You would find them confident to say that we can tell you your future. By knowing your brain imaging or genetic material. And perhaps the good thing about it is that even statistical approaches to how we look at data are now getting farther and farther from the idea of replication. Which means if I do the same experiment again, what is the likelihood that I get exactly the same response to expectation? Which means if I run a large sample of second experiment, what proportion of my observations are going to be similar to the previous one? Which I think takes into account very much the fact.

[F]

That's why it's in your hands, though.

[A]

Sorry?

[F]

I mean, that's why it's in your hands as scientists that hopefully we can trust at universities that are doing research. But this information doesn't necessarily stay in scientists hands. This could easily be transferable to the state that can understand what our preferences are, whether we're going to be more likely to rebel against regimes, things like that. Well, it stays in your hands.

[A]

That's fine.

[F]

I trust you, you're a nice guy up there. But if it's in a politician's hands, I might not trust it as much. And there's no guarantee that you can hold the information if the state wants it. At the moment there's not.

[A]

As I was saying, I don't think that this scientific trend is taking the profiling aspect very seriously because there's a very strong awareness of the limitations of what you can say with data of any kind of nature within neuroscience. Perhaps we can go to the next question if there is. Yep.

[D]

Please.

[A]

Thank you.

[D]

Yeah.

[G]

Yeah. I have two questions. First of all, what would each member on the panel say is their definitive work on privacy?

[D]

And second.

[G]

Yeah. What would each member of the panel say is their definitive work on privacy?

[A]

Okay.

[G]

And the second question is how they feel about information technology, in particular the advent of social networks, and how we somewhat willingly give up our privacy and they use that for data to companies.

[A]

So the second question is about social networks.

[G]

Yeah, Social networks and the way we willingly. We somewhat willingly give up our personal data and the social networks give that to advertisers. How do they feel about that? Does that undercut their feeling about elemental fear of giving away privacy?

[A]

What you want to say?

[B]

I'm not sure that many people have really thought through the implications of just giving up their personal information in social networking. I mean, we know that there have been instance of people putting very embarrassing pictures up on Facebook and their employers have subsequently seen them and they've even been sacked. I don't think anyone would have perhaps thought of that as an implication of what they were doing when you're behind a computer screen. You don't necessarily feel as if you're being watched by the whole world. I suppose it's a bit like being in a car where you. You feel protected. So you take further risks by being in a car and being contained and feeling safe than you might, you know, on a moped or a motorbike, where you do feel more exposed.

[A]

Also, I think the first question was.

[D]

Definitive work on privacy.

[B]

Well, I think we would all say this book, would we not?

[A]

This book, I Know what yout're Thinking, is a compilation of many essays by both neuroscientists, ethicists and philosophers on this issue.

[B]

Really, you should have predicted that.

[D]

I'd just say that in the legal sphere. Well, the seminal work. Seminal is an article in the Harvard Law review in the 1890s by Warren and Brandeis. And this was sort of joining the dots of a number of legal claims like defamation and so on, and saying, actually, what's at issue here is privacy. But what provoked this was the development of the camera and unauthorized photographs being taken. That was where it started. But I mean, from that point on, you know, just to say, what's the definitive work on privacy is, I'm afraid, like, you know, what's the definitive work on justice or equality? Well, actually, no, just on equality or whatever. You know, it's just there are so many major works on this.

[C]

Yes, I was going to actually abstain from that question about the definitive work because I'm not sure. I think I'd need a lot more time to think about it. But about the social networks question, I guess I kind of agree with what Sarah here has said, which is that we often consent to something without necessarily having thought about all the possible further implications. So in our minds, we may have, through lack of imagination or rush or whatever, we may have only thought of quite a limited number of consequences of this agreement. So, obviously, if you go on Facebook, you've got all kinds of goals that you're hoping to advance socially, and it may well be that you haven't actually necessarily thought through what else might be done with the data. So I think it's quite a different thing asking about what somebody would think in a particular context if they were absolutely clear what all the uses were going to be. And as it were, a blanket thinking that that tells us anything about a wider consent.

[A]

Okay. I also want to add something about this one because there is an interesting paper was published last year looking at this question of what could possibly motivate people to give away information about themselves for free for everybody else to see. The paper's claim was that that expressing information about yourself in a sort of publishing way, in the way that we see in social media, is inherently rewarding and people get satisfaction out of knowing that everybody knows something about them. Now that paper, you can contest the methodology and how they have actually measured this kind of of idea, but that in itself could be also an important issue to take into account. And interestingly, that paper also did a lot of fancy neuroimaging and they showed that when people actually put some information for everybody else to see about where they have gone for holidays, apart from the fact that they are reminiscing about the memory of the holidays, there is an over and above that level of if you look like brain reward response. Without falling into the hazards of reverse inference. That paper claimed that therefore it must be satisfying. So what I mean here is that from the psychology and neuroimaging point of view, there seems to be also some claims for maybe it's not just that people don't know what they are doing when they are giving the way information. Maybe there is also some inherent value for them which you could think of it as something like fame or self image or whatever that is. So another question perhaps. Oh, okay.

[G]

Of the 1890s article and what was the name of the paper that you just mentioned?

[A]

That one you should get back to me and I should find it on Google memory.

[D]

Fails me, but yeah, the title of the. Oh, sorry. The authors of the Harvard Law Review article are Samuel J. Warren and Louis Brandeis. Warren and Brandeis.

[A]

Okay, so next question over there.

[H]

I actually have a company in Node Networks and Cryptography. So from the science side or other IT side can add a few things possibly. I don't know if you're aware of Lifeline Biocryptography and a few things that have come up with that which I find rather scary. I mean there are hacks that I've sort of. A few of us have come up with. So it's not necessarily as secure as everybody thinks, but something that's going to be tracking a lot of people possibly in a few years, especially on a political standpoint.

[A]

Could you hold the microphone closer please?

[H]

Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I was just saying about Lifeline biocryptography, I don't know if you've really come across that. That what your thoughts are on it.

[C]

No.

[H]

And there's also a patent which was recently given in the States to do with emotional resonance and sort of cultural backgrounds which Also is rather disturbing.

[A]

Perhaps you could tell us more first how you think that relates to the issue of neuroscience. And.

[H]

Well, it's really to do with, really to do with privacy in that aspect. And this was compromise, you know, how everybody's interacting with everybody else. And also on the side of neuroscience, not so much technical neuroscience, but when you combine that with behavioral prompting and analytics, sort of as somebody else pointed out and as you selves discussed, it's not simply the mechanics of the brain, it's how you actually feed thoughts to people and then realize their emotional responses. And that's being tracked quite well. You can do that nowadays. So sort of going towards the future. One of the aspects is cryptography and maintaining a sense of privacy within society. And I was just wondering in particular, especially with bio cryptography lifelines, which it takes tracking to a completely other level, what your thoughts were about that. Sorry if I'm getting a bit too geeky on that sense. I do realize it's not everybody's covered in any comments.

[B]

I don't think I know enough about this technology to be able to comment off the top of my head.

[C]

I'm afraid I'm in the same position.

[D]

Yeah, sounded like one of your thought experiments, I thought. I don't know about it either.

[A]

No, it's okay for me, the issue of cryptography, and correct me if I'm wrong in understanding its relationship to brain sciences. For example, one way that it could be important would be if you could use, for example, brain imaging to figure out, for example, my passwords for my bank account. Is that right?

[H]

I mean there has been studies to do with automatic responses to access cryptography fees. So you'd learn a piece of music and you would automatically learn the positioning without having conscious recollection. And that's used as a cryptographic key. So that would be, I think, a relatively direct link. So I see.

[A]

Okay, so what you're saying is that actually your brain responses would be taken as, for example, as a measure of your identity. Let's say this is.

[H]

Well, as part of the key to information. So when you go back to. Is privacy a commodity in that sense? Is it your asset? Are you giving it away? Can somebody steal it? Do you want them to steal it?

[A]

Well, this turns out, I think as a new case, I think now we can. Now that we have clarified what you mean, perhaps you can ask how you feel about its relationship to the issue of privacy. If I was to use in the same way that we use biometrics for identifying people, if I was to Use, for example, brain responses as a metric or as an identifier of your identity or as a marker of your identity. Do you think the same kind of rules of ethics apply here? Is that right? Yeah, that's a very good question.

[D]

Thank you.

[C]

Well, I'm still not. I probably haven't properly understood the work you're talking about, but it seems to me we often draw a distinction between the brain and the mind. And I'm not sure that there's anything very different about using brain patterns to identify people from any other means. Isn't it just another biometric?

[H]

Obviously, it's how everything works together. But as we were talking about future technologies and obviously you were bringing up thought experiments. Well, this actually isn't really technically a thought experiment anymore. It's actually happening. So obviously slightly on. It's not quite blue sky anymore. Was going beyond the laboratories. I think MIT Labs have got a few startups pushing some of these forward. So in the next, with technology accelerating quite so fast, I certainly imagine it'd be in the public sphere in the next five years. So it sort of is going to have a direct impact on society.

[B]

But presumably the scanners used to pick up the. The signature or the pin. Brain waves still be constrained by what we're used to seeing.

[H]

Well, the thing is, I mean, as you pointed out, that's one aspect of the technology. There are other aspects of the biocryptography which wouldn't necessarily just be on the neuroscience aspect. So you could look at eye responses and triggers. It's how everything feeds together with analytics, really. And it's just. I find it rather. I mean, it's my field and I find it rather scary. And he was talking about legislating things.

[A]

I want to perhaps rephrase the same question in a different way. Why should we be afraid of such a situation if we have accepted that, for example, your fingerprints or your DNA can be used to identify you? In what fundamental way is this? Where is the ethical issue with using this kind of thing for identification? Given that we have already accepted, for example, they validated the relevance of fingerprints or DNA, in what way are we accepting further new risks? You see my point. Where is your work?

[H]

Sorry, it wasn't simply using the tool of neuroscience as a layer is how it all works in unity and how actually people can be tracked and identified and their thought patterns altered. As I mentioned, with the American patent, with the emotional resonance. It's not just what you're thinking, it's not necessarily the image, it's how people prompt you what to think and then track you using your biometrics. I mean, it's not just your phone, it's everybody else's phone. And I know I'm sounding a bit paranoid here, and I do appreciate that.

[A]

You already talked about that.

[B]

And it's not a very large step to think that such pins or passwords might be built into sort of the technology that we use every day, like laptops. I mean, we already have sort of fingerprint access to our laptops in order to ostensibly make them more secure. But of course, once the computer and your IP address is linked with your identity, then whatever you do online can be traced back to.

[H]

Well, this was the lifeline technology that I brought up, which I'm particularly concerned about, because they're proponing that and saying this is the best way so you won't be defrauded. So a lifeline biocryptography, which is basically your mobile phone that you'd have on you all the time, they track you through analytics and predict your movements to the next degree. And I find that combining with your fingerprint, your iris recognition combined with everything else, there's a lot of information, and it's basically, you'd be walking around with your personal dog tag. So it is Minority Report, as somebody sort of suggested earlier, and that's pretty much here. That technology's been launched a month or so ago. So when you combine it all together, you're sort of thinking, well, there should be some possibly discussions on the legal framework about the value of privacy and especially how it can be abused.

[B]

It'll be very interesting to see how the revised data protection laws will address this. We were talking earlier about having a reasonable expectation of privacy and what would feed into that. But I know that the European Commission is suggesting that we should have a right to be forgotten. Now, quite what that means, especially if you're on Facebook, remains to be seen.

[H]

I mean, it's quite interesting.

[A]

I'll just see if you have any further questions to take, but if not, then I'll get back to you. Is there any other questions that. Oh, okay, good. So let's start with you at the front and then you. And then you. Yeah, the front row, please. Yep.

[E]

Thanks very much for that discussion. I just wondered, what do you think the effect of the erosion of privacy will have on people's health? And I suppose some of the softer things, because although certain technologies can be used to help, for instance, MRI scans, I think the constant kind of public exposure that people have can sometimes place stress on people and we kind of need that time away from our public face and to meditate or whatever and just to be human. So I just wondered what your thoughts were on that.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Well, I'm not sure that I would want to sign up to being in the Big Brother house, put it that way. I don't think it would do my health any good whatsoever.

[D]

I think one of the philosophical justifications for privacy is that it gives you space to be non conformist and that in a free society you need some privacy. Otherwise you're constantly, well, like in, you know, in the Orwellian, you know, dystopia, you, you, you just worried about just having to stay on the norm. So I think if you, yeah, if you were sort of adventurous soul, you would, you do, you would need privacy. And.

[B]

Of course there are sort of cultural differences, aren't there really, in how we think about privacy and how important we think.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I wanted to also resonate with what Sarah said at the beginning, that a lot of like our, if you like, worries about how bad it might be when everybody knows the contents of your brain. I wouldn't say mind, but brain. We do not really have any principled way of predicting them or being afraid of them. I would say. Sarah, do you want to comment on that one? Because I think this question particularly relates to what you said.

[C]

Well, first I wanted to ask you why just now you said you wouldn't say mind but you would say brain. Because it seems to me that most of people's anxieties about this do relate to the mind and not the brain. I either care.

[A]

Well, I would say the technology, as far as the technology is concerned, the technology is reading the brain. You could, under specific experimental conditions, you could say that probably what you're reading from the brain is the content of the mind. Like for example, where you are paying attention to or what word you are searching for in your head. You could probably say that. But eventually what your brain technology is doing is reading your brain states.

[C]

Sure. But the question about whether this is likely to impact on our health or say through stress is presumably because there's some worry that what we're seeing in this information is information about the mind.

[A]

No, I agree, I agree with that. I agree with the connection that one could make later on to bring up that worry. But I wanted to make the distinction that the technology itself, what it does, is brain reading.

[C]

Yes, yes. Well, I think I would agree with you that it looks as though this is the difference between the public and the private is something that we all seem to care hugely about. And if that's right, either we're all going to be very stressed and aroused once that line gets shifted, or we're going to change into other kinds of creatures.

[A]

Perhaps you can take the next question.

[D]

All right.

[A]

You actually kind of answered my question, so. Oh, okay.

[D]

All right. So.

[A]

So the question was answered. That's great. So we have one more at the back and then two here. Okay, that's good. So maybe. All right.

[F]

Okay.

[I]

Hello. Just on what you just said, I think what a lot of people forget is that privacy is not. Something like 150 years ago you didn't have your privacy because you had noisy neighbors. And it's always been there. I think it's just because you. Because it's like a global community that can potentially take part and that it might get so scary. But. But for most of history, people were scared of what their neighbors thought, what the, I don't know, priests across the street thought when they saw someone going in. And it's not like it's a completely new thing, only because now there is Facebook and the Internet. It's just that now it's different and it has shifted into the digital age.

[A]

That's a very relevant comment, I think. Let's go to that question over there.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Something like three minutes. So I want to see if we can get through all of the questions.

[E]

Okay.

[J]

My question is in relation to the earlier discussion on regulation and the role of the moral community and in terms of thinking about emerging technologies, how we understand the role of public engagement and outreach with ordinary people like us, in terms of how we understand privacy and respect in this context, what it means, and then in terms of how decisions are made about that, how we democratise that in terms of involvement of the public.

[D]

I think, you know, the principle here. I think I'm very clear about that. You know, deliberative democracy is what we should be trying to do in relation to these technological developments. There was a. I think there's a very interesting report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics at the end of last year about emerging biotechnologies. But you could have generalized it to emerging technologies. All about much more public engagement. So I think the principle is clear, at least for me. You want to democratize these decisions. The problem, I think, is the practice is how you actually organize things in a way that people who are not experts on these technologies can get up to speed with what's going on in a way that they can then engage. Engage with the policy and the ethical Issues and I don't think we've been conspicuously successful in doing that. I rather like the idea of there being foresight, sort of horizon scanning, expert groups that get this onto the agenda very early on. But I must say that in the work I've done with the academies where they've done public engagement, I've not really been terrifically impressed by, by what we got out of that. And I rather regret that when we had an exercise some years ago in the Academy of Medical Sciences where it was drugs futures, it was trying to work out what the public felt about the use of drugs for recreational purposes, for treatment of mental health, for enhancement. And although the dialogue on recreational drug use was very robust, on the other hand issues which were more kind of the future, it was much less clear. And it's difficult to get people engaged. So you know, I have great sympathy with public engagement but how you do it and of course you. Sorry, go on, but I mean there is also the danger, of course, well known danger that regulators or governments will use public engagement just to justify the decision they've already come to. So, so if the public engagement comes up with the right answer, that's fine, but if it doesn't, they'll keep on publicly engaging until they get the answer they want.

[J]

About how you create meaningful ownership of those decisions by the public in partnership with the regulators or the government decision makers.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[J]

There's a really interesting organization called Involve and they work with biz and science wise. Yeah, interesting.

[A]

So let's just get the last question over here, please.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

In this future of being able to read people's thoughts and stuff, how would you respect the privacy of children?

[D]

Yeah, children. Can I just go very quickly on this? I mean research on children is one of the most difficult, difficult areas of all, I think because you can't get consent from, well, assuming they're young children, they can't consent. So you know, regulators rely on what's in the best interests of children. And best interests is such a flaky concept that again there's a real danger here that the people who are relying on best interests just do, just plead it to do what they find convenience of what to do. It can be abused. I think children are very vulnerable population that we can't defend through consent. But although paternalism is not, you know, exactly flavour of the month philosophically we do need a kind of in line paternalism with children. But I can't give you there's any guarantee that their privacy is protected.

[A]

Okay. I guess it's a good time to put our hands together and say thank you.