Facebook announced that it assembled a team of 60 people to develop a technology allowing users to “think” commands and messages at their smartphones. The system would be able to literally read your mind … constantly. What could go wrong?

The people at Facebook are going down a path that can only be described as post-Orwellian. Not satisfied with the fact that their users willingly share their most intimate information on a daily basis, Facebook is looking to reshape the world and decipher thoughts that haven’t even been verbalized.
In February, Mark Zuckerberg released the “ Facebook Manifesto ” which, under a thin veil of altruistic vocabulary, hid a dystopian vision of a “connected world” where the flow of information was
overseen and propagated using artificial intelligence and elaborated algorithms. But that’s not enough.
On April 19th, the company revealed its most ambitious (and scary) project to date.

Facebook plans to develop non-invasive sensors that can measure brain activity hundreds of times per second at high resolution to decode brain signals associated with language in real time. “No such technology exists today; we’ll need to develop one.”
Facebook is looking at using optical imaging – using lasers to capture changes in the properties of neurons as they fire – to glean words straight from our brain before we say them. If these signals can be read, they can be transmitted silently to other people.
If the thought that a company that makes almost all of its money from harvesting your personal data could also have access to your thoughts is scary, that’s because it is.
Dugan attempted to assuage people’s fears by pointing out that Facebook would only decode the words you were going to say anyway. “It’s not about decoding random thoughts,” she said. “We’re talking about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.”
– The Guardian, Facebook has 60 people working on how to read your mind.

White elephant project.