SAFE Enough to Think: Federated Learning Comes for Your Brain
Hospitals do not usually wake up excited to pool brain data. Neither do device vendors, rehabilitation centers, or anyone with a lawyer who has read a privacy regulation without falling asleep halfway through. EEG data is useful precisely because it is personal. That is also why centralizing it is awkward. This is the practical tension behind SAFE, short for Secure and Accurate Federated Learning, a proposed framework for EEG-based brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs.1 The paper is not interesting because it says “federated learning protects privacy.” That line has already been printed on enough PowerPoint slides to qualify as industrial wallpaper. The interesting part is that the authors treat federated learning as only one piece of the problem. ...