mental privacy

Mental privacy is the right to keep your inner life to yourself — your thoughts, intentions, attention, and feelings — unless you choose to share them. For most of history this right protected itself: no one could see inside your head. You decided what to say and what to keep.

Brain–computer interfaces change the setting. A device that records neural signals cannot read sentences like a mind-reader in a film, but it can pick up hints — that you are paying attention, getting ready to move, recognizing a face, or feeling stressed. Those hints are coarse and easy to misread, yet they touch territory that used to be fully your own.

So mental privacy becomes a practical question, not just a philosophical one: what may be measured, who may see it, and whether you can say no. It is one reason brain data is often treated as needing special protection.