UBCO’s Dr. Wendy Wong poses with award-winning Canadian writer Margaret Atwood at the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy award ceremony last week. Photo credit: Canadian Writer’s Trust.
Dr. Wendy Wong, Digital Transparency Co-lead and UBC Okanagan Professor, Political Science, is the winner of the 2024 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy for We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age.
Published last year, the book examines how tech companies shape our lives by controlling the vast amounts of personal data we generate online, highlighting how everyday digital interactions fuel extensive data tracking, reshaping society in both positive and negative ways.
“I was thinking about these AI systems and I realized that social science is being relatively silent, especially political science,” says Dr. Wong. “But in the face of these rapidly developing technologies—that promised so much for humanity—there is real detriment to society. We weren’t thinking about some of the social, political and cultural changes that were about to happen; the way we treat each other in society and the way we treat ourselves. All of that as we know now, has come to the fore. And we think about each other very differently.”