Riley Wong is the Principal of Emergent Research, a research lab and consultancy investigating digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent. Their work explores the intersections of cryptographic tooling, cooperative governance, and community-led design, with a particular focus on how communities facing surveillance and repression can build and govern their own community infrastructure.

Riley co-founded the Community Privacy Residency in Taipei and Berlin, convening an international network of experts to co-create privacy infrastructure by and with vulnerable communities. Their background spans privacy-preserving data governance, consent infrastructure, and decentralized collective governance at Metagov, 0xPARC, and DWeb; machine learning engineering and AI ethics at Google; and award-winning investigative data journalism at ProPublica. Their work has been published or presented at MIT, Harvard Kennedy School, Yale, and Penn.