Try to remember every thought that crossed your mind at work today—from the benign, like what to have for lunch, to the inflammatory, like why that supervisor is such a jerk. Now imagine if your boss had access to all of those thoughts and feelings. Sounds crazy, right? It’s rapidly becoming closer to reality.

Tesla founder Elon Musk’s company Neuralink just this summer announced that human trials will move forward next year for an implantable device that can read a user’s mind; scientists at UCSF recently released the results of a brain activity study, backed by Facebook, that shows it’s possible to use brain-wave technology to decode speech; in 2018, Nissan unveiled Brain-to-Vehicle technology that would allow vehicles to interpret signals from the driver’s brain; and Nielsen is already using neuroscience to capture nonconscious aspects of consumer decision-making.

There are, of course, both therapeutic and nontherapeutic reasons why people are interested in trying to figure out how to decode the brain. Musk’s clinical trial, for example, will focus on patients with complete paralysis due to an upper spinal cord injury. The hope is that the implanted mechanism will allow the user to virtually control any device, like a smartphone or an electric vehicle, with only their mind, which would be revolutionary for patients with physical limitations.

But Musk’s plans for Neuralink aren’t entirely altruistic. He believes every human being will eventually wear his device as a way to keep up with artificial intelligence. For now, though, a consumer-based EEG device, similar to a fitness tracker, is the most likely to impact us in the short-term. It’s noninvasive, relatively inexpensive, and is already being implemented in places like China and Australia.

In April, the South China Morning Post reported that “government-backed surveillance projects are deploying brain-reading technology to detect changes in emotional states in employees on the production line, the military and at the helm of high-speed trains.” According to The Sydney Morning Herald, several Australian mining companies have adopted a SmartCap, a device that looks like a baseball cap but is lined with EEG electrodes on the interior rim, to “reduce the impact of fatigue on the safety and productivity of their staff.”

These detectors, then, in some cases, are being used to improve the safety of workers. The device might warn a miner of exposure to carbon monoxide poisoning before they suffer a traumatic brain injury or send an alert to a truck or train driver to pull over if excessive drowsiness is detected.

But, Nita Farahany, a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies, who gave a TED Talk on the subject last November, warns that there are currently no safeguards in place to protect against inappropriate use of the data.