Montana Advances Nation’s First Brainwave Privacy Law

Montana is on the verge of enacting the strongest brain privacy law in the nation.

Senate Bill 163 — which has now passed both chambers of the state legislature — expands Montana’s Genetic Information Privacy Act to include protections for neurotechnology data. That means your brainwaves, mental states, nervous system signals, and cognitive patterns — the raw data from EEG headbands, neural implants, and brain-computer interfaces — would no longer be fair game for companies or the government to access, store, or sell without your explicit consent.

The bill now awaits the governor’s signature to become law.

This isn’t science fiction. Neurotech is here.

Whether used for medical therapy, workplace productivity, or consumer entertainment, devices that read your brainwaves (and even attempt to influence them) are no longer experimental. And until now, they’ve been completely unregulated in most contexts. These devices don’t just collect data — they can infer your emotions, track your attention span, and even attempt to nudge your behavior.

SB 163 confronts this head-on, recognizing the unique risks posed by data collected from the human brain and nervous system. And it does something rare: it puts the individual in charge.

What’s in the Bill

If signed into law, SB 163 would establish some of the most robust biometric data protections in the country:

• Storage controls: Neural data couldn’t be stored in sanctioned or adversary nations, and can’t be transferred abroad without user consent.
• Consent for everything: Clear, opt-in consent required for collection, storage, sharing, marketing, and each specific use of brain data.
• User rights: Individuals can access their data, revoke consent, and request deletion of data or destruction of biological samples.
• Limits on law enforcement: Agencies need a warrant or subpoena to access brain or genetic data, even in commercial databases.
• Restrictions on insurers and employers: Your neural data can’t be shared with your boss or insurance provider without your permission.

This isn’t just about future-proofing privacy. It’s about stopping a new form of surveillance before it becomes normalized.

Why This Stands Out

Privacy legislation often comes with tradeoffs: vague language, carveouts for government use, or sweeping powers for regulatory agencies. SB 163 is refreshingly different. It keeps the focus on individual control — requiring real consent, setting limits on both private actors and public agencies, and acknowledging that neural data is unlike anything else we’ve ever digitized.

That said, there are some things to keep an eye on:

• It introduces new compliance requirements that could burden small businesses and startups.
• It restricts data storage based on federal designations of foreign adversaries — a move that ties privacy to foreign policy.
• It allows exemptions for some government-affiliated research efforts and relies heavily on federal definitions and standards.

But compared to most privacy bills, this one gets the fundamentals right: your body, your data, your choice.

Next Steps

If you’re concerned about brain data becoming just another corporate asset — or about neural surveillance creeping into workplaces and schools — this is the kind of law worth demanding in your own state. Because the future of privacy isn’t just about passwords and phone data. It’s about what’s going on inside your head.

And Montana, of all places, just became the first to draw a clear boundary.