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Facebook Won’t Say If It Will Use Your Brain Activity for Advertisements
Every year, Facebook gathers hundreds of developers, corporate allies, and members of the press to hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of our shared near future. The gathering is known as “F8,” and this year’s iteration included some radical plans, one of which could’ve been pulled from a William Gibson novel: Facebook is working on a means of using your brain as an input device.
Such technology is still many years off, as is, apparently, Facebook’s willingness to publicly think through its very serious implications.
Details on how the Facebook brain/computer interface would function are scant, likely because the company hasn’t invented it yet. But it’s fair to say the company has already put a great deal of effort into considering what capabilities such an interface would have, and how it would be designed, judging from its press announcement: “We have taken a distinctly different, non-invasive and deeply scientific approach to building a brain-computer speech-to-text interface,” the company says, describing the project as “a silent speech interface with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text,” with a stated goal of allowing “100 words per minute, straight from the speech center of your brain.” This process will be executed “via non-invasive sensors that can be shipped at scale” using “optical imaging” that can poll “brain activity hundreds of times per second.”
“The privacy of text” is an interesting turn of phrase for Facebook, which has, like its competitor Google, built itself into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company more or less on the basis of text typed into a computer not being private but rather an excellent vector through which to target advertising. For its thought-to-text project, Facebook claims it’s built a team of “over 60 scientists, engineers and system integrators” from some of the most esteemed research universities around the U.S. (headed by a former DARPA director, no less). Privacy concerns drove some of the very first questions from journalists after the F8 announcement, including in this passage from The Verge:
[Facebook research director Regina] Dugan stresses that it’s not about invading your thoughts — an important disclaimer, given the public’s anxiety over privacy violations from social networks as large as Facebook. Rather, “this is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain,” reads the company’s official announcement. “Think of it like this: You take many photos and choose to share only some of them. Similarly, you have many thoughts and choose to share only some of them.”
Facebook was clearly prepared to face at least some questions about the privacy impact of using the brain as an input source. So, then, a fair question even for this nascent technology is whether it too will be part of the company’s mammoth advertising machine, and I asked Facebook precisely that on the day the tech was announced: Is Facebook able to, as of right now, make a commitment that user brain activity will not be used in any way for advertising purposes of any kind?
Facebook spokesperson Ha Thai replied:
We are developing an interface that allows you to communicate with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text. Specifically, only communications that you have already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain. Privacy will be built into this system, as every Facebook effort.
This didn’t answer the question, so I replied:
My question is this: Is Facebook able, as of right now, to make a commitment that user brain activity will not be used in any way for advertising purposes of any kind?
To which Thai replied:
Sam, that’s the best answer I can provide as of right now...
Facebook has about as good of a chance of getting me to let them plug into my brain as Hillary Clinton did of getting me to vote for her. I don't even use Facebook messenger. I also use adblocking add-ons (plural) and add-ons specifically to block certain features on Facebook.
The only reason I use Facebook at all (under a fake name) is to keep in touch with friends and family.
Every year, Facebook gathers hundreds of developers, corporate allies, and members of the press to hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of our shared near future. The gathering is known as “F8,” and this year’s iteration included some radical plans, one of which could’ve been pulled from a William Gibson novel: Facebook is working on a means of using your brain as an input device.
Such technology is still many years off, as is, apparently, Facebook’s willingness to publicly think through its very serious implications.
Details on how the Facebook brain/computer interface would function are scant, likely because the company hasn’t invented it yet. But it’s fair to say the company has already put a great deal of effort into considering what capabilities such an interface would have, and how it would be designed, judging from its press announcement: “We have taken a distinctly different, non-invasive and deeply scientific approach to building a brain-computer speech-to-text interface,” the company says, describing the project as “a silent speech interface with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text,” with a stated goal of allowing “100 words per minute, straight from the speech center of your brain.” This process will be executed “via non-invasive sensors that can be shipped at scale” using “optical imaging” that can poll “brain activity hundreds of times per second.”
“The privacy of text” is an interesting turn of phrase for Facebook, which has, like its competitor Google, built itself into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company more or less on the basis of text typed into a computer not being private but rather an excellent vector through which to target advertising. For its thought-to-text project, Facebook claims it’s built a team of “over 60 scientists, engineers and system integrators” from some of the most esteemed research universities around the U.S. (headed by a former DARPA director, no less). Privacy concerns drove some of the very first questions from journalists after the F8 announcement, including in this passage from The Verge:
[Facebook research director Regina] Dugan stresses that it’s not about invading your thoughts — an important disclaimer, given the public’s anxiety over privacy violations from social networks as large as Facebook. Rather, “this is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain,” reads the company’s official announcement. “Think of it like this: You take many photos and choose to share only some of them. Similarly, you have many thoughts and choose to share only some of them.”
Facebook was clearly prepared to face at least some questions about the privacy impact of using the brain as an input source. So, then, a fair question even for this nascent technology is whether it too will be part of the company’s mammoth advertising machine, and I asked Facebook precisely that on the day the tech was announced: Is Facebook able to, as of right now, make a commitment that user brain activity will not be used in any way for advertising purposes of any kind?
Facebook spokesperson Ha Thai replied:
We are developing an interface that allows you to communicate with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text. Specifically, only communications that you have already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain. Privacy will be built into this system, as every Facebook effort.
This didn’t answer the question, so I replied:
My question is this: Is Facebook able, as of right now, to make a commitment that user brain activity will not be used in any way for advertising purposes of any kind?
To which Thai replied:
Sam, that’s the best answer I can provide as of right now...
Facebook has about as good of a chance of getting me to let them plug into my brain as Hillary Clinton did of getting me to vote for her. I don't even use Facebook messenger. I also use adblocking add-ons (plural) and add-ons specifically to block certain features on Facebook.
The only reason I use Facebook at all (under a fake name) is to keep in touch with friends and family.
