Ben Yee sees the whole system.
Ben Yee has been involved in politics for 20 years. Why run for this seat now?
“In this moment, I want to do the maximum that I can. What is the maximalist position that I can take? I can run for this office,” Yee told us. With the Trump administration rolling back civil rights gains, Yee sees AD66’s open seat as an opportunity to bring his experience in tech, state government, and nonprofits to the state legislature. “Certainly, you can’t keep doing things the way it’s been happening,” he said.
As the child of a Holocaust refugee and a first-generation Chinese American, Yee learned early on that his existence was the product of the civil rights not only endowed by the Constitution, but by the efforts of activists who fought for them. “Civil rights are not something that are an amorphous idea,” Yee said. “I really do believe that we need to, every day, fight for and understand what’s happening in our economy, and in our politics, to ensure that everybody has the freedoms and the opportunities that my parents received, and that I received.”
That framing shapes how Yee views technology. When considering tech policies, he has several guiding civil rights-focused questions whose answers are increasingly determined by technology. These are “What authority the government has to intervene in your life, what authority the government has to collect your information, and what authority the government allows private organizations, like corporations, to do the same.“
Yee’s top tech policy priority is strengthening individuals’ right to their own data. While he was working at Pencil Spaces, an education tech startup creating a centralized online learning platform, he had the opportunity to travel to Asia and Europe. He realized that much more thought was being put into the rights of the individual, particularly minors, vis-à-vis data privacy and the Right to Be Forgotten. “Right now, [data] really only goes one way,” he said. “You opt in to give [services like Google, Meta, and TikTok] your data in exchange for this service, largely for free, but it’s impossible to get that out meaningfully.”
While Yee acknowledged that many people already have their digital information on the internet, he believes that it’s not too late for biomedical information, which he views as the most essential. “The idea that, secretly, in exchange for [knowing your ancestry], you’ve handed over your genetic code to a private entity to make money off of in a way that most people don’t even know about? That should be illegal,” he said.
Yee would also seek to pass regulations on dark patterns, which are UI designs that can encourage addictive behaviors and/or make it hard to opt-out of services or subscriptions. If New York State, one of the largest markets in the US, passed legislation on this, it could incentivize corporations to change their behaviors. Yee would also work to strengthen the legal right to repair, which would allow individuals to freely maintain, repair, or modify products without being forced to use the manufacturer’s authorized services.
Yee foregrounds his “systems approach” to tech policy, a product of his varied experience and his degree in economics, as something that sets him apart. For example, when it comes to AI and the economy, Yee hopes to combine New York State’s competitive advantage in research with the presence of sectors with potential for AI-enabled job growth in order to create accelerators, tax incentives, and structures that can create new jobs in sectors like biotech. In turn, reducing transit time between research hubs and commercial tech hubs would boost innovation and revenue. “The economy is not one piece over here and one piece over there,” Yee said. “These are things that interplay with each other constantly.”
Taxation is another area where Yee puts on his economist hat. He sees taxation not only as a source of revenue, “but more importantly, it is a disincentive on behavior that is negative.” To that end, Yee is willing to impose taxes on data centers, and would require them to have their own clean energy supply. “We cannot sacrifice our economy or our environment for AI because we think it’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he said. “If we can do sustainable data center development in New York State, then we can also do a better job driving AI research and development here as well.”
Now that Yee is running for office, he does “have to wake up at, like, 6:30 every day.” It’s a far cry from when Yee was working in tech — when he could work until 10, and also show up at 10. “[That] dream is dead,” he laughed. “But I have a new dream to make New York State, the United States, a better place.”
You can learn more about Ben Yee at https://www.votebenyee.nyc/.
