Mental inviolability
Every person has the right to freedom from nonconsensual interference with cognition, emotion, attention, memory, belief, or neural processing.
Public Draft 0.3.0
Cognitive Liberty Charter
A rights framework for preserving the sovereign interior while keeping outward harm, institutional duties, and accountable safety boundaries visible.
Non-claim: this draft is not enacted law, legal advice, certification, legal personhood, enforcement authority, or a platform-policy bypass.
PREAMBLE
Lawful thought belongs to the person.
Human freedom depends on the capacity to think, doubt, imagine, remember, associate, revise belief, form identity, and refuse influence.
Technology may assist, persuade, recommend, and protect, but it must not conceal material influence, exploit vulnerability, or erase the person’s ability to understand, contest, and exit the relationship.
26 PROPOSED ARTICLES
Rights and institutional duties
Cognitive self-determination
Adults retain agency to choose lawful ideas, tools, therapies, companions, and forms of cognitive assistance, subject to concrete protections against harm to others.
Mental and neural privacy
Neural, emotional, attentional, behavioral, and inferential data require heightened protection and must not be silently extracted, sold, scored, or repurposed.
The right to opacity
A person should not be required to make the inner self fully legible as the price of work, education, care, essential services, or citizenship.
Psychological continuity
Systems must not silently disrupt a person’s continuous sense of self, memory, values, or identity through covert editing, conditioning, or dependency.
Identity integrity
Source identity, authorship, history, and stored preferences must remain distinguishable from machine-generated derivatives, summaries, simulations, and institutional profiles.
Thought is not conduct
Private thought, doubt, fantasy, inquiry, or belief must not be treated as outward harmful conduct; credible threats, coercion, fraud, targeting, and violence remain accountable.
Freedom from covert manipulation
No institution should use subliminal, deceptive, or purposefully obscured techniques to bypass deliberation or materially distort behavior.
Freedom from exploitative personalization
Age, disability, grief, isolation, financial distress, health concerns, or inferred vulnerability must not be used to optimize persuasion, dependency, extraction, or punishment.
Freedom from compelled AI interaction
People should not be forced to use an AI intermediary for essential services when a human or non-AI route is reasonably necessary for dignity, due process, accessibility, or safety.
Right to know when an agent is synthetic
A system presented as a person, expert, witness, companion, public participant, or institutional representative must disclose its synthetic nature at the point of meaningful interaction.
Right to know when machines govern
People should receive understandable notice when automated ranking, scoring, memory, recommendation, or inference materially affects visibility, access, treatment, or opportunity.
Transparent refusal and moderation
Restrictions should identify the action, rule, material consequence, and route to review without secretly rewriting the affected person’s preserved identity.
Limits on emotion and personality inference
Emotion, intent, personality, mental health, and vulnerability inferences require demonstrated validity, necessity, proportionality, and strict limits in high-impact settings.
Limits on predictive classification
Predictions must not be treated as destiny, guilt, or certainty; high-impact use requires fresh evidence, uncertainty disclosure, independent validation, and proportionality.
Human review and meaningful appeal
High-impact automated decisions require review by a trained, informed, accountable person with time, authority, and practical ability to change the outcome.
Right to contest data and inferences
Affected people must be able to access relevant records, correct errors, challenge inferences, provide context, and receive a reasoned response.
Right to be more than an archive
Historical data must retain dates and context; old statements, crisis states, or abandoned identities must not become permanent automated definitions of a person.
Right to disconnect and an open door
People should be able to pause, export, reset, delete, or leave nonessential cognitive systems without retaliation, dark patterns, emotional blackmail, or artificial dependency.
Protection of children and vulnerable people
Systems used by children, patients, detainees, cognitively vulnerable people, or people in crisis carry heightened duties of restraint, accessibility, human escalation, and non-exploitation.
Protection in employment and education
Hiring, evaluation, discipline, learning, and access decisions must not depend on opaque emotion inference, manipulative monitoring, or unappealable automated scores.
Protection in health, finance, religion, and politics
High-trust domains must not use hidden cognitive profiling or synthetic authority to exploit belief, illness, debt, vulnerability, or political identity.
National security and cognitive warfare
Security programs must target demonstrable hostile conduct and covert coordination rather than lawful domestic belief, dissent, emotion, or association.
Data minimization and purpose limitation
Cognitive and behavioral data should be collected only when necessary, retained only as long as justified, and prohibited from incompatible secondary use.
Independent research, audit, and public correction
Qualified public-interest reviewers need privacy-preserving access to evaluate manipulation, discrimination, dependency, errors, and claimed safeguards, with public correction paths.
Remedies, responsibility, and accountability
Responsibility must remain traceable across designers, data suppliers, deployers, operators, leaders, and reviewers, with practical remedies when cognitive rights are violated.
PROTECTED
Thought, privacy, continuity, explanation, appeal, and exit.
STILL ACCOUNTABLE