Neuralink User Data Rights: What Protections Do You Have?
- Neuralink's privacy policy, updated March 12, 2025, says the company does not sell personal information.
- For trial participants, the policy says data is governed by the trial protocol, informed consent, and, where applicable, HIPAA authorization forms, so their rights over neural recordings are set in consent documents that are not public.
- Colorado, California, Montana, and Connecticut have passed laws that protect neural data, and the MIND Act would direct the FTC to study the issue.
What the privacy policy says
The N1 implant records signals from 1,024 electrodes in the motor cortex, and that data lets participants control devices by thought. Neuralink's privacy policy, last updated March 12, 2025, says the company does not sell personal information. It also says data from clinical trials is governed by the trial protocol, each participant's informed consent, and, where applicable, HIPAA authorization forms.
Neuralink uses participants' data to improve its decoders. Its 2026 decoders were pretrained on over 50,000 hours of neural data, and the median participant now reaches about 10 bits per second, according to Neuralink's October 2026 update.
Rights for different groups
People who are not in a trial, such as Patient Registry applicants and website visitors, have the rights described in the privacy policy and in state privacy laws like California's.
For implanted participants, Neuralink has not published what access they have to their raw recordings, how long the recordings are kept, or how deletion works. Those terms are in the trial consent forms. Noland Arbaugh and other participants have used the implant daily for long periods, and the PRIME study follows each participant for about 6 years.
State laws
Colorado, California, Montana, and Connecticut have passed laws that protect neural data, treating it as sensitive information similar to biometrics. These laws mainly target consumer products, and medical trials also fall under federal research rules.
How data is processed
The implant amplifies and processes signals on its chip and sends them over Bluetooth to the participant's paired device, where decoders turn them into actions. Neuralink describes a patented pairing system meant to link the implant only to authorized devices, but it has not published its encryption details. Neuralink reported zero serious device-related adverse events as of January 2026; it has not published security-incident data.
Trial data is shared with the parties that any FDA-regulated trial involves, such as the trial sites, their ethics boards, and regulators.
Federal rules
On September 24, 2025, Senators Schumer, Cantwell, and Markey introduced the MIND Act, which would direct the FTC to study how neural data is collected and used and recommend protections. Neuralink holds FDA Breakthrough Device Designations for Blindsight and speech restoration. Internal projections reported by Bloomberg target 20,000 implants a year by 2031, which would make clear public rules on neural data more pressing.
This article was first published in October 2025 and corrected in October 2026; the latest patient count is on the patient table.
