In November 2025, Connected Minds and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) hosted a round table on “Privacy, Freedom of Thought, and Emerging Neurotechnology” with deputy commissioner and senior general counsel, Marc Chénier, and colleagues at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). An outcome of the discussion was the identification of scenario planning as a tool to move the conversation from abstract concern to concrete policy insight.
The purpose of this workshop is to frame transformative neurotechnologies within a range of scenarios to better understand their prospective benefits alongside legal, regulatory and societal implications, as well as Canada’s preparedness for high-risk situations involving the potential breach, misuse or compromise of neurodata. This is especially timely as these technologies advance faster than existing privacy and governance frameworks are currently equipped to manage.
Using a structured scenario forecasting exercise, participants will assess possible trajectories of technological adoption, identify enabling conditions, consider both anticipated benefits and foreseeable harms, and evaluate how the velocity of change shapes regulatory choices and policy responses. Rather than focusing solely on institutional vulnerability, the workshop will examine drivers of uptake, political feasibility, social acceptance and the range of tools available to policy makers. This approach is intended to surface areas of uncertainty, governance gaps, cross-cutting factors and strategic opportunities that may not be apparent through doctrinal analysis alone.
The workshop will:
- identify and prioritize high-impact use cases across sectors most relevant to neurodata governance;
- develop and run plausible, near-term scenarios involving neuroprivacy threats, compromised neurodata and cross-domain risks to reveal incentives, trade-offs and distributional effects;
- explore how international norms and domestic legal structures can be operationalized in practice;
- bring together policy makers, academics and legal, ethics, technical and security experts to identify where current tools succeed, where they fall short, and where additional guidance or coordination is most urgently needed; and
- distill key findings and actionable insights to be summarized in a report for OPC.