Tech is scanning your brain, eyes and mood

Editor's Note

Hello from London!

A theme from a few of the stories of the last few weeks that stood out for me was how tech is quite literally scanning our brains. NextSense is an Alphabet spinoff that would sit in your ears and monitor your brainwaves:

It takes data from the buds and displays it on a number of charts and graphs—kind of like the display you see in a hospital room, the one where you hope that none of the lines goes flat. On the screen, I get an instant look at my brain waves, a thick green spiky line on a chart logging the amplitude. He taps to pull up different views and to flip between the two buds. “That looks like a typical EEG,” Berent says, maybe as much to reassure me that I’m normal as to assert that his product is capturing brain waves.

And then there was the story of Worldcoin promising crypto in return for scanning your eyeballs. The aim was to find uniqueness in the eyeball (Minority Report style), to prove a real person is who they say they are online:

“Ensuring a person is human, unique, and alive is an unsolved problem,” reads an internal Worldcoin deck marked as confidential. Worldcoin says that once its systems are perfected, it will anonymize and delete users’ biometric data, thereby guaranteeing their privacy. But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even though it has captured and stored almost a half-million iris scans to train its algorithms.

This continues with AI software monitoring your mood when you are on a Zoom call, for example, with a company called Uniphore:

The company sells software that attempts to detect whether a potential customer is interested in what a salesperson has to say during a video call, alerting the salesperson in real time during the meeting if someone seems more or less engaged in a particular topic.

This infiltration of our minds worries me the most about big tech. There's one thing knowing our data, but knowing our mind steps technology to new spheres. We will soon be second-guessing ourselves. In addition, imagine our DNA combined with our usage data online, with our health data and wearables - and we become pawns in a simulation game run by large organisations. Of course, this is why we fight for privacy rights, why we don't always say yes to cookies and why we should VPNs all the time.

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

PS. Are gyms obsolete?

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