Can Your Boss Read Your Brain? California Is Deciding Where Workplace Surveillance Should End
As neurotechnology moves from laboratories into everyday life, California lawmakers are confronting a question that once belonged in only science fiction: Who should be allowed access to information produced by the human brain?
By JEANNIE KIM
Imagine arriving at work and putting on a headset that tracks your concentration. The headset tells your employer exactly when you are attentive, when your performance begins to decline, and even how you are feeling at any given point. At what point does a means to measure productivity become monitoring the mind?
California lawmakers are beginning to confront that question. Assembly Bill 1883, which was passed by the California Legislature and is awaiting action from Governor Gavin Newsom, would restrict employers from using certain AI-powered workplace surveillance systems to collect workers’ neural data or recognize and predict their emotional states. The proposal represents an emerging challenge for the law within the data collection sector: neuroscience is increasingly capable of translating activity from the human nervous system into measurable data, while the rules governing who can access that information are still developing.
From Brain Signals to Data
Neurotechnology includes technologies that measure or interact with the human nervous system, and some of its most promising applications are medical. For example, brain-computer interfaces can translate neural activity into commands for external devices, potentially allowing people with paralysis to communicate or control computers. Other technological advancements can noninvasively measure electrical or physiological signals from outside one’s body.
These developments offer enormous medical possibilities and are becoming a frontier in the intersections of health and technology, but also create an unusual privacy problem: brain activity can become data. As scientists and algorithms become better at interpreting neural signs, information collected for a certain purpose can potentially reveal details about attention, cognitive functioning, neurological health, and emotional responses that an individual never intended to sign off on.
California Draws a Line at Work
AB 1883 (Assembly Bill 1883), California’s Bill on AI-powered surveillance, attempts to establish a boundary around one particular use of this information: employment. The workplace presents a unique problem as consent between an employee and employer is not created equal. A worker asked to use a monitoring device may technically be able to refuse, but doing so could carry professional consequences.
This raises an even larger question: When one person or institution holds significantly more power than another, is consent enough to protect mental privacy? California has already classified certain neural information as sensitive personal information under its consumer privacy framework, while states like Colorado have also expanded privacy protections involving neural data. AB 1883 would bring that debate directly into the workplace.
Why Neural Data Is Different
Employers already collect enormous amounts of information, more than many may realize. Security cameras record workers, software monitors computer activity, and company-issued smartphones can track one’s location and usage of a device. Neural information, however, is fundamentally different: passwords can be changed and devices can be turned off, but a person cannot replace their brain.
As neurotechnology becomes more sophisticated, neural information could reveal increasingly intimate details on an individual’s cognitive or medical state. This makes the debate extend beyond ordinary data privacy, but its extension into mental privacy, cognitive autonomy, and mental integrity, the idea that individuals should maintain control over access to and interference with their own mental processes.
The Law Is Catching Up
The United States currently lacks a comprehensive federal law that dictates the governance and usage of neural data. Instead, protections are developing through state privacy laws, medical regulations, and consumer protections. And this creates difficult boundaries; neural information collected by a hospital may receive protections that similar information gathered by a consumer device does not.
What Questions Remain?
AB 1883 has officially become Californian law. However, much larger questions persist. Should schools ever be allowed to use neurotechnology to measure student attention? Could neurological information influence insurance decisions? Could neural recordings become evidence in court? And if a future algorithm discovers something new within previously collected neural data, who should control that discovery?
These questions may sound futuristic, but the technologies creating them are already developing. The most important legal battles surrounding neurotechnology may begin long before a machine can truly “read someone’s mind.” They begin when technology can transform increasingly intimate biological activity into information that employers, governments, and other institutions may want to access.
For centuries, the contents of the human mind have largely remained beyond the reach of law as they remained beyond the reach of technology. Neuroscience is beginning to change the second assumption. The law must now decide how much of the first should remain true.
Sources & Further Reading
California Legislature. Assembly Bill 1883 (2025–2026). California State Legislature.
Colorado General Assembly. Colorado Privacy Act: Protections Concerning Neural Data. Colorado General Assembly.
Sandbrink, Jonas B., and Matthew J. Young. “Advancing Data Protections for Implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces.” Communications Medicine, 2026.
Young, Matthew J., et al. “Safeguarding Neural Data.” Neurology, 2026.
Are there companies already using this technology in real workplaces?
What do you think about opponents of AB 1883 that claim that the surveillance technology would enhance workplace safety?
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