Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience: The Impact on Data Protection and Privacy

Nicola Fabiano

Starting from a multidisciplinary approach, we want to investigate the kind of impact of high technologies used in neuroscience on humans to analyse the effects on data privacy and protection domain. It is still a field under a due course of deepening, and probably there are few scientific pieces of evidence, but it certainly is one of the most relevant challenges of our times although some people think this is a topic of the future. Neuroscience, data protection and privacy are current aspects, and we should deal with them now to avoid unrecoverable consequences or distorted findings. What will be the destiny of privacy and data protection in the neuroscience domain? Our approach is not technical, and thus we will not describe or propose specific technical solutions. Still, our goal is to warn about the possible effects on data protection and privacy, essentially on human dignity, hoping scientists would consider the principles laid down by the current laws and Ethics. Indeed, here comes into play also another fundamental aspect which is exactly Ethics. There is some very innovative research on the human brain in the neuroscience field, where scientists decided to use high-technologies and artificial intelligence to investigate and deepen the effects on human behaviour. We are facing a challenge, and we already heard about "neuroprivacy". This new term entails examining another privacy sector to deal with, and it led us to create a neologism which we defined as "neuroprivacy rights". Hence, there is needing to investigate all the legal effects on data protection and privacy derived from applied technologies in the neuroscience field to clarify whether we have a new category of rights. We think it is crucial to apply the Data Protection and Privacy Relationships Model (its acronym is DAPPREMO) in this deepening path.

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