Prof. Florence Chee shares insights from her cross-sectoral work that combines approaches from law, policy, and ethics to improve the conditions under which data for training AI systems is gathered, bought, and sold. 

Using a technocultural lens, she examines the ethical dilemmas that arise when player data is leveraged in game design. A key focus lies on the business models and decision-makers behind these games, which increasingly rely on data collected from individuals in vulnerable communities and contexts. 

Dr. Chee also addresses the challenges of ensuring meaningful consent – especially for those with limited capacity to provide it, such as children – in environments where trust should be fundamental: the home, schools, and both public and private digital platforms. Her research highlights how everyday participation in these spaces can lead to the normalization of predatory or extractive relationships between users and digital systems.

Dr. Florence Chee serves as Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Communication and Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. She is also the Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology. Her book, Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play (2023 Lexington Books), critiques commonly held notions of online game addiction by taking an ethnographic look at the social and cultural roles that games fulfill in everyday life.

Building bridges between disciplinary boundaries and communities of practice, Dr. Chee holds Affiliate Faculty Status with the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and is a Community-Engaged Experiential Learning Scholar named by the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (CELTS) at Loyola University Chicago. Her research examines the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of emergent digital lifestyles with a particular focus on the examination of artificial intelligence, games, social media, mobile platforms, and translating insights about their lived contexts across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors.  

Since 2020, Dr. Chee has served as an External Consultee to the Freedom Online Coalition's (FOC) Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights (T-FAIR) and Key Constituent of the United Nations 3C Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence. Named to the Fulbright Specialist Roster for the next three years (2025-2028), Professor Chee has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Specialist grant to examine the U.S and Swiss game industries and is hosted in Switzerland by the ZHAW School of Management and Law at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.