LAUSR

People crossing the border into the United States or Canada may find their electronic devices subject to search. Border agents can require travelers to unlock their devices, and then browse through their photos, text messages, emails, contacts, documents, and other digital media. While this practice has been criticized as unduly invasive, the extended mind hypothesis suggests this invasion runs deeper than expected: border agents might not only be accessing the contents of our smartphones or laptops, but also the contents of our very minds. The extended mind hypothesis offers that mental processes can be constituted by external technologies. But if our mental processes can extend over external technologies, then some of our mental content or “mental data” may be accessible through those external technologies as well (Palermos 2023). Where our mental content is typically assumed to be uniquely private to ourselves, mind extending technologies may render those contents accessible to others. Accordingly, border agents may be reading our mental content, not merely phone content. But if we should be concerned about the unique privacy issues that Orestis Palermos (2023) offers, then we should be further concerned about how those issues might be distributed across populations. For example, it is well known that border surveillance disproportionately profiles and impacts marginalized groups, including those who are immigrants, racialized, and transgender. On this account, they would be greater risk of having their minds read. Further research will need to enquire further: Whose mental data is more likely to be externalized and thus at risk of mental data exposures? How might existing privacy inequities affect mind extending technologies? Attending to these questions requires a more expansive approach to privacy and mind extending technologies.