Narrator: A family, let's call them the Madeups, installs a Ring video doorbell for convenience and security. At first, they love it. They can see when packages arrive and when their kids get home. But soon, the mother, Claire, starts to feel uneasy. On a short walk, she counts fifty such doorbells, all watching, all recording. She realizes they are part of a vast, privately-owned surveillance network, chronicling public life without anyone's consent. This seemingly small household decision sparks a family conflict and a public debate, revealing a deep tension between security, convenience, and freedom. This modern dilemma is at the heart of Wendy H. Wong's book, We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. The book argues that our digital footprints are not just harmless bits of information; they are fundamentally reshaping our lives and challenging the very meaning of human rights.

Narrator: The book introduces the concept of "datafication"—the process of turning every aspect of human life into quantifiable data. This data is not fleeting; it's "sticky." Wong defines this stickiness through four characteristics: it's co-created between us and the platforms we use, it captures mundane, everyday activities, it's easily linked across different databases, and it's practically immortal. Once created, it's nearly impossible to delete.

The consequences of this stickiness are profound and personal. Consider the story of Rafaela Aldaco, a single mother trying to secure housing. A battery conviction from when she was eighteen, which had been legally expunged from her record, resurfaced in a background check run by a private tenant-screening company. The court ruled the company had the right to use this information. Despite her legal record being cleared, the "sticky" data from her past prevented her from getting a home, directly impacting her autonomy and dignity. This illustrates a core argument of the book: the power imbalance between data collectors and individuals, or "data sources," is immense. While our individual data seems negligible, in aggregate it fuels the multi-billion-dollar industry of "surveillance capitalism," often at the cost of our fundamental human rights.

Narrator: Many believe the solution to data privacy is individual ownership—if we own our data, we can control it. The book dismantles this idea, arguing that data is rarely just "ours." The famous "right to be forgotten," established in Europe, serves as a prime example. The case was brought by a Spaniard, Mario Costeja González, who wanted Google to remove search results linking to a long-resolved debt from years prior. He won, establishing a landmark precedent. Yet, the right is difficult to enforce, with Google delisting URLs only about half the time. Ironically, González himself later became a figure of "public interest" due to his case, making him ineligible for the very right he helped create.

Furthermore, data is often collective. The book uses the hunt for the Golden State Killer to illustrate this. For decades, the serial killer remained at large. In 2018, investigators uploaded his DNA from a crime scene to public genealogy websites. They didn't find him, but they found his distant relatives. By building a family tree from the data voluntarily submitted by others, they identified Joseph James DeAngelo. The DNA of his relatives, who had no knowledge of his crimes, led to his capture. This case powerfully demonstrates that data about one person has implications for many others, making the concept of purely individual ownership and control a fiction.

Narrator: Big Tech companies are not just service providers; they are essential "everyday infrastructure." When Meta's platforms went dark for six hours in 2021, it wasn't just a social media outage. It was a global disruption of communication, commerce, and information access for billions. Wong argues that these companies function as "global governors," exercising state-like power without public accountability. They create and enforce rules through their algorithms and terms of service, shaping what we see, say, and even think.

This private authority is driven by profit, creating a deep tension with human rights. In Myanmar, Facebook became the de facto internet for millions. This ubiquity was exploited to spread hate speech that fueled the genocide against the Rohingya minority. Despite warnings, the company was slow to act, and a subsequent lawsuit against Meta was dismissed. Similarly, its Free Basics program, pitched as a philanthropic effort to connect the developing world, offered a curated, "truncated" version of the internet that violated net neutrality and expanded Meta's data-collection empire. These examples show that Big Tech's "social good" missions are often a smokescreen for market expansion, with devastating human rights consequences when left unchecked.

Narrator: In a world governed by data, being data illiterate is a profound vulnerability. The book illustrates this through the Madeup family's teenage son, Jack. For six months, he was tormented by a sophisticated phishing email that preyed on his insecurities about being adopted. The email, which he believed to be real, caused him to lash out at his parents, creating deep family pain. Even for a digitally native teenager, the inability to critically analyze the source and intent of digital information—a core component of data literacy—had severe emotional consequences.

Wong argues that data literacy, or the ability to "read, work with, analyze, and argue with data," is a fundamental human right for the 21st century. She critiques the popular metaphor of social media as a "digital town square," pointing out that these are private, for-profit spaces, not public utilities. To counter this, she champions public libraries as the ideal institutions to foster data literacy. With their history as trusted community hubs, their professional ethics rooted in intellectual freedom, and their expertise in organizing information, librarians are uniquely positioned to teach citizens how to navigate the datafied world and become active, informed stakeholders.

Narrator: The book's conclusion pushes into the future, exploring how datafication is blurring the lines between human and machine. It introduces Miquela Sousa, a virtual influencer with millions of followers and a contract with a major talent agency. She is not a real person, but a computer-generated character. For corporations, she is the perfect asset: controllable, free of past scandals, and aesthetically perfect. Miquela's existence forces us to confront what a "fundamentally human life" even is, a question at the very core of human rights.

Because data is sticky, collective, and controlled by powerful corporations, individual solutions are insufficient. The book argues for new models of collective action. It critiques "data trusts" as being too focused on managing data after it's already been created. Instead, it proposes "data unions," which, like labor unions, would bargain on behalf of their members to set the terms of data collection and usage before it happens. This shifts power back to the collective. Regulation must also evolve, moving beyond just data use to address the fundamental act of data collection.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from We, the Data is that datafication is not a technical issue about privacy; it is a profound human rights issue that challenges our autonomy, dignity, equality, and sense of community. Wendy H. Wong argues that we must stop seeing ourselves as passive "users" or "data subjects" and instead embrace our role as active "data stakeholders."

The book leaves us with a critical challenge. We live in a world where our digital ghosts may outlive us, where our faces can be turned into data points, and where our most mundane actions are monetized. The question is no longer if we will participate in this system, but how. Will we continue to click "agree" without understanding the terms of our surrender, or will we, the data, act collectively to demand a digital world that is built to serve human values, not just corporate profit?