Researchers can find your deepest secrets by scanning your brain

Verifying your identity with brainwave scans sounds pretty awesome on the surface, but new research from from Texas Tech University shows that EEG identification could be the start of a whole new world of privacy concerns. It's not so much that brainwaves are susceptible to forgery, like fingerprints -- it's that EEG scanning applications can glean a lot more from your grey matter than you might want. Security researchers Abdul Serwadda and Richard Matovu recently tested a pair of EEG authentication systems to see if it was possible to identify personal information from anonymous brainwave scans. The pair created a machine learning system that compared the new brainwaves scans to EEG scans from a group of known alcoholics -- and the machine successfully identified 25-percent of persons who identified themselves as alcoholics in the new sample. "We weren't surprised," Serwadda said of the experiment.