Data is 'sticky,' there's way too much, and we don't control it, warns political scientist
Professor Wendy H. Wong argues for a human rights approach when it comes to how our data should be collected
You are a data-generating machine just by being connected to the modern world.
"Almost all facets of human behaviour have now become pieces of data that have become digitized," Wendy H. Wong told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.
"Your SIN, your address, your birthday, we kind of think of that as personal and very private data. But that's just a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of the types of information that are being collected about us."
Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and the author of We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. It won the 2024 winner of the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy.
She argues data is a human rights issue because there are no guardrails in place to protect us from how much data big tech companies generate and collect about us. And we have little say in the matter, nor how it's used to define us and shape our behaviour.
Wong spoke to Ayed about what it means to be 'datafied,' a term that describes how facets of human behaviour become pieces of data that are digitized, changing how we might live our lives.
What's the relationship between us and the data about us?
The relationship is that it comes directly from us. So rather than thinking about the data, about all of our mundane activities as data exhaust or as detritus, which are two common ways to think about data — it's not a byproduct.
It's actually descriptive of who we are. Its identity and that link has been lost. So in that sense, it flattens out human life. It makes it easier to just say, 'Well,... this is what the data says,' so therefore, you suffer these consequences, whether we think about that in terms of denying people mortgages or, often, it's used in assessing rental candidates for housing.
You can think about it in terms of predictions for who might be a good driver who might be a healthy person in terms of the insurance industry. I mean, there's so many different ways to think about how the data that feedback into how we are affected in all our different systems, social systems, economic systems, to be enabled in certain types of experiences.
I wonder if it's too simplistic to say that we have become our data.
I don't think it's too simplistic. There are a lot of people who actually make that point. It's important not to reduce human life to just data. I think we're both data and we are physical discretionary beings who make choices, who have thoughts that stick and things that happen in our lives that are still — not to date — tracked.
But there's a whole lot going on in our lives that is tracked. We're increasingly being defined by data and our life choices, what's available to us, is increasingly being squeezed by this extensive data analytic system we've created.
And I think that there's probably a distinction between what we should think of ourselves, whether we are or are not our data, or whether our data is our selves and how the big companies see us. They see us as data now.
Yeah, I mean, they see our data and try to make decisions based on what they observe and what they pull from this data. Human beings, we're not discrete in the sense that we interact with the world. So how we think about things can change depending on what interactions we have.
I do think part of what makes datafication challenging is that the more tailored or narrow those opportunities for us to interact are, the more it can reinforce filter bubbles. For example, social media, what you see can reinforce ideas in your head and make people more and more extreme and more embedded with it because they think that this is a widespread idea, or this is something that everyone thinks instead of understanding that there's a whole range of ideas and opinions out there. That's one consequence that a lot of people have observed.
But in general, the way that we live our lives through data and the data generation that all of us are engaged in with these data collecting companies, I don't think it's been looked at so much as a part of human existence going forward. People sort of forget about that, and it's really easy to forget that 20 years ago, datafication was not so extensive.
Right. It's kind of in the water that we swim in.
Yes, that's part of the sort of secret sauce, as it were in what I'm trying to expose, which is that, alternatives exist because the data are about human behaviours and affect human beings, that we have a whole bunch of rights that exist. We have entitlements as human beings, and this international framework around human rights that's been around since at least 1948.
The companies that are doing the data collection, who are they? What companies and entities are we talking about here?
We like talking about Big Tech, the usual suspects. But it goes beyond that. If you think about the importance of data, the economies of data out there in the business world, I would argue that it's really any company that has a digital presence, any company that is engaged online, which is so many, right?
You talk about a solution in which you say that we should become treated as stakeholders in the data that we co-create. And also in addition, how it's actually used. Can you talk about in practice what that would mean? What kind of shift would that require?
We should think about ourselves as stakeholders. If we understand that we do actually play a really important role in the creation of data, that we are half the equation... it sounds really airy-fairy to say just shift your mindset but I do think that actually really matters because if you think that you have a stake, that you're just as important as the Googles and the Metas of the world in the datafication of our lives, then that gives us agency in democracies to make demands of our leaders and to tell our policymakers that these practices are unacceptable.
But are we really half of that equation? Can we equate ourselves with Google and Meta and Twitter?
Yes. I mean, by definition, to collect data about an individual person, that person must exist right in the world where the data are about living people or actual people who have existed.
Now, you're absolutely right to point out that any one of us is no match for these giant trillion-dollar companies. If it's just me or you having this realization that we're stakeholders, but nobody else thinks that way, well, yes, of course. This is why, as a political scientist, it helps to think about these issues because we think about collective action and what it takes to change a situation.
It's not going to happen because one or two people believe in it. It might happen if a collective believes in it. And then what are they rallying around? How are they going to think about themselves as part of the process, as stakeholders? That's where you see all social movements, the demands for change that come from citizens, that come from the grassroots, they all come from people realizing that they are different from what they've been told they are.
So we're not data subjects — data subject has so many meanings, none of which are empowering. You're either a subject of the data or you are subject to the data. And both of those are positions of passivity. If you say, you're a data stakeholder, it means that you have a reason to be part of the conversation.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to the full conversation.
*Q&A edited for clarity and length.This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.
