Montana House Passes Bill Adding Neurotechnology to Genetic Privacy Law
The Montana House unanimously passed a neural data privacy bill on Wednesday. The House voted 99-0 to pass an amended SB-163 that adds neurotechnology data to the state’s Genetic Information Privacy Act.
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SB-163 would additionally modify the law to allow people to volunteer for medical studies. While the Senate previously passed SB-163 unanimously on Jan. 28 (see 2501290004), the bill must return to the Senate to concur with what the House passed.
The House amended the bill to replace the term neural with neurotechnology, defining that as “devices capable of recording, interpreting, or altering the response of an individual’s central or peripheral nervous system to its internal or external environment and includes mental augmentation, which means improving human cognition and behavior through direct recording or manipulation of neural activity by neurotechnology.”
The House-amended bill says neurotechnology data is “information that is captured by neurotechnologies, is generated by measuring the activity of an individual's central or peripheral nervous systems, or is data associated with neural activity, which means the activity of neurons or glial cells in the central or peripheral nervous system.” It doesn’t include “information about the downstream physical effects of neural activity, including by not limited to pupil dilation, motor activity, and breathing rate.”
Also, the House added an exemption for “deidentified genetic data obtained from a third party to the extent that the data is used to conduct internal, medical, or scientific research.”
Global pharmaceutical company GSK and a state medical association supported the bill at a hearing last week (see 2501240034). Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R), who previously authored the genetic privacy bill and Montana’s comprehensive privacy law, sponsored SB-163.