The company's research into a consumer mind-reading device is over, for now. In Chile, legislators are even considering a human rights bill to protect brain data, free will, and mental privacy from tech companies. Still, Marc Slutzky, a professor at Northwestern, says the UCSF project is an “impressive next step” that demonstrates both remarkable possibilities and some limits of the brain-reading science. Project Steno was a multi-year collaboration between Facebook and the University of California San Francisco’s Chang Lab, aiming to create a system that translates brain activity into words.