2025 Frank W. Woods Lecture - We, The Data: How to Think About AI as a Human Rights Issue

Why It Matters

Treating data as a human‑rights issue forces companies to redesign AI pipelines, driving stricter compliance and reshaping market competition.

Key Takeaways

• Data not algorithms or compute is core human rights issue
• AI's impact extends beyond privacy to equality and autonomy
• Current human‑rights frameworks struggle to regulate opaque data practices
• Big tech’s data control shapes everyday decisions and societal outcomes
• Policymakers must treat data as a rights‑based regulatory priority

Summary

The 2025 Frank W. Woods Lecture, delivered by Wendy Wong, framed AI not as a purely technical challenge but as a human‑rights issue, arguing that the data that feed AI systems are the primary vector through which rights are threatened.

Wong broke AI into three inseparable components—algorithms, compute power, and data—and contended that only data consistently implicates rights such as privacy, autonomy, equality and dignity. She warned that current human‑rights tools are ill‑suited to the opacity and scale of modern data collection and algorithmic profiling.

Citing concrete examples—credit‑scoring, mortgage eligibility, border questioning, and personalized feeds—Wong emphasized that data shape both how institutions see individuals and how individuals perceive themselves. She rejected the shortcut of equating AI ethics with privacy, insisting that data‑driven decisions constitute a rights problem.

The lecture calls on governments, regulators and corporations to reframe data governance as a rights‑based imperative, suggesting new accountability mechanisms and transparent oversight. For businesses, this signals an imminent shift toward stricter compliance, risk‑management, and the need to embed human‑rights assessments into AI product lifecycles.

Original Description

Human rights are one of the major political innovations of the 20th century. Their emergence after World War II and global uptake promised a new world in which human autonomy, community, dignity, and equality could be protected. The growth of AI has introduced some new and unique challenges to human rights. The datafication of human life and the collection of data about everyday life has created a "stickiness" that we have not tackled well to date. Professor Wong argues that to be useful, the regulation of AI, and digital technologies more generally, must focus on the ubiquity of data in human life.

About the speaker

Dr. Wendy H. Wong is a Professor and Principal’s Research Chair in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science at UBC Okanagan.

In 2024, Dr. Wong was recognized as UBC Okanagan Researcher of the Year. A distinguished political scientist specializing in International Relations, her research encompasses global governance, technology, human rights and NGOs.

Her recent book, We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age (MIT, 2023), merges her expertise in human rights with insights from big data and artificial intelligence (AI), advocating for digital literacy with public libraries as essential community hubs. The book has received notable recognition, including being a finalist for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize and highlighted by CBC’s The House and the Journal of Democracy.

Dr. Wong frequently contributes to media discussions on technology and societal issues. Previously, she directed the Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict and Justice, and served as research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute at the University of Toronto.