Fighting for our cognitive liberty

Liz Mineo

The Harvard Gazette

Originally published 26 April 23

Imagine going to work and having your employer monitor your brainwaves to see whether you’re mentally tired or fully engaged in filling out that spreadsheet on April sales.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School and author of “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology,” says it’s already happening, and we all should be worried about it.

Farahany highlighted the promise and risks of neurotechnology in a conversation with Francis X. Shen, an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the MGH Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliated professor at Harvard Law School. The Monday webinar was co-sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and the Dana Foundation.

Farahany said the practice of tracking workers’ brains, once exclusively the stuff of science fiction, follows the natural evolution of personal technology, which has normalized the use of wearable devices that chronicle heartbeats, footsteps, and body temperatures. Sensors capable of detecting and decoding brain activity already have been embedded into everyday devices such as earbuds, headphones, watches, and wearable tattoos.

“Commodification of brain data has already begun,” she said. “Brain sensors are already being sold worldwide. It isn’t everybody who’s using them yet. When it becomes an everyday part of our everyday lives, that’s the moment at which you hope that the safeguards are already in place. That’s why I think now is the right moment to do so.”

Safeguards to protect people’s freedom of thought, privacy, and self-determination should be implemented now, said Farahany. Five thousand companies around the world are using SmartCap technologies to track workers’ fatigue levels, and many other companies are using other technologies to track focus, engagement and boredom in the workplace.

If protections are put in place, said Farahany, the story with neurotechnology could be different than the one Shoshana Zuboff warns of in her 2019 book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” In it Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, examines the threat of the widescale corporate commodification of personal data in which predictions of our consumer activities are bought, sold, and used to modify behavior.

The article is here.

Psychological principles could explain major healthcare failings

Press Release
Bangor University
Originally released on

Here is an excerpt:

In the research paper, Dr Michelle Rydon-Grange who has just qualified as a Clinical Psychologist at the School of Psychology, applies psychological theory to find new understandings of the causes that lead to catastrophic failures in healthcare settings.  She explains that the aspect often neglected in inquiries is the role that human behaviour plays in contributing to these failures, and hopes that using psychological theories could prevent their reoccurrence in the future.

The value of psychological theory in safety-critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power has long been acknowledged and is based upon the notion that certain employee behaviours are required to maintain safety. However, the same is not yet true of healthcare.

Though there may not be obvious similarities between various healthcare scandals which have occurred in disparate areas of medicine over the last few decades, striking similarities in the conditions under which these crises occurred can be found, according to Rydon-Grange.

The entire pressor is here.

What Opinions Can Psychologists Give About Persons They Have Never Met?

What Opinions Can Psychologists Give About Persons Whom They Have Never Met?

Harvard Researchers Accused of Breaching Students' Privacy

Social-network project shows promise and peril of doing social science online

By Marc Parry
Chronicle of Higher Education

In 2006, Harvard sociologists struck a mother lode of social-science data, offering a new way to answer big questions about how race and cultural tastes affect relationships.

The source: some 1,700 Facebook profiles, downloaded from an entire class of students at an "anonymous" university, that could reveal how friendships and interests evolve over time.

It was the kind of collection that hundreds of scholars would find interesting. And in 2008, the Harvard team began to realize that potential by publicly releasing part of its archive.

But today the data-sharing venture has collapsed. The Facebook archive is more like plutonium than gold—its contents yanked offline, its future release uncertain, its creators scolded by some scholars for downloading the profiles without students' knowledge and for failing to protect their privacy. Those students have been identified as Harvard College's Class of 2009.

The story of that collapse shines a light on emerging ethical challenges faced by scholars researching social networks and other online environments.

The Harvard sociologists argue that the data pulled from students' Facebook profiles could lead to great scientific benefits, and that substantial efforts have been made to protect the students. Jason Kaufman, the project's principal investigator and a research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, points out that data were redacted to minimize the risk of identification. No student seems to have suffered any harm. Mr. Kaufman accuses his critics of acting like "academic paparazzi."

Adding to the complications, researchers like Mr. Kaufman are being asked to safeguard privacy in an era when grant-making agencies increasingly request that data be shared—as the National Science Foundation did as a condition for backing Harvard's Facebook study.

The Facebook project began to unravel in 2008, when a privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, showed that the "anonymous" data of Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues could be cracked to identify the source as Harvard undergraduates.

The entire story can be read here.