Professor Anita Say Chan's book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) has been named a finalist in the Computing and Information Sciences Category of the 2026 PROSE Awards. The annual awards bestowed by the Association of American Publishers recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing and celebrate works that have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study.
Predatory Data examines how the eugenics movement foreshadows the predatory data tactics used in today's tech industry. Chan defines "predatory data" as "the habitual use of data and research methods that exploits the vulnerable" – from race and gendered minoritized communities, to disabled populations, and the working poor - through datafication and prediction operations that reify majoritarian politics and normalize authoritarian appetites. In her book, she reveals how Big Tech uses these predatory data collection methods to target minoritized populations with the goal of generating profit and anti-pluralistic monocultures. Her book also shares lessons from the data collaborations of earlier feminists, immigrants, and other minorities who refused eugenic models, to remind us of the long legacies of global justice-based data initiatives that worked to defend knowledge pluralisms.
Chan is a professor in the iSchool and holds an appointment in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Media. She directs the Community Data Clinic, which empowers community-centered data and research collaborations in East Central Illinois, and she co-leads the Just Infrastructures Initiative with faculty in the Grainger College of Engineering. Chan received her PhD from MIT in history and anthropology of science and technology studies.