Dr. Eduardo Bertoni, Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law, and Dr. Marcello Ienca, Professor at the School of Medicine and Health at the Technical University of Munich, prepared this expert report on the Privacy and Data Protection Implication of the Use of Neurotechnology and Neural Data from the Perspective of Convention 108+. The authors presented the report at the 46th plenary meeting of the Committee of Convention 108 (T-PD) of the Council of Europe (CoE) held on June 5-7, 2024, in Strasbourg.

The report explains neurotechnology and neural data from legal and technical perspectives and tackles the question: How can neurotechnology and neural data affect fundamental rights and freedoms – the rights to privacy and personal data protection in particular? Dr. Bertoni and Dr. Ienca focus on Convention 108+ in examining the data privacy concerns that the processing of neural data entails and underscore the necessity of striking a balance between the protection of people’s privacy on the one hand and the promotion of innovation in neuroscience on the other. In their recommendations to state parties, the authors insist that “the principles governing personal data protection set out in Convention 108 must be observed when processing neural data if the data is personal data. They should be recognized as a general, mandatory framework and include definitions of appropriate, specific, and legitimate aims of processing. They should include a requirement for adequate, relevant, and not excessive data, limited data storage time, and security measures that guarantee the confidentiality of the data and respect for the rights of individuals.”