Part 4
Legal considerations
The legal considerations associated with human augmentation technologies are numerous,
spanning international and domestic, public and private, and civil and criminal law. Part 4
briefly considers some of the key legal complexities to illustrate issues that will require careful
consideration now and in the future.
Human rights
Human rights and property law are examples of legal fields which may need to adapt as
technologies become integrated with, rather than merely used by, people. People have
legal rights and machines do not, but human augmentation will make it increasingly difficult
to adopt this binary approach as machines are integrated with our bodies – potentially
at a molecular level. An example is the discussion about possibilities that humans may
become cyborgs in the future.^30 The term has many mythical, metaphorical and technical
connotations, but it reflects the idea that humans no longer merely use machines – we
increasingly depend on them for our most human-like activities.^31
Ownership of human augmentation technologies, and the data they use and collect, will
need to be carefully considered if implants become integral parts of our bodies. For example,
people who wear pacemakers often do not have any rights to access data gathered and
transmitted by these devices. Within the European Union this problem is in part managed
by the privacy law General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which regulates access to
personal data. There are also varying rights of third-party access to such data, which will
become increasingly valuable (and exploitable) in the future. If not effectively regulated by
law, such areas of inconsistency and/or ambiguity create the potential for individual privacy to
be breached through what could become to be known as ‘under-skin’ surveillance methods.
It is plausible that device ownership becomes an issue if immaterial property rights prevents
unlimited use, or the individual is not the legal owner of an integral part of their own body.
30 Cyborg is defined as: a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond
human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body. Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th Edition.
31 Wittes, B. and Chong, J., (2014), Brookings.edu, ‘Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications’.
Human augmentation may require humans and cyborgs to be legally
distinguished in the future