Regulating for the Future: The Law’s Enforcement Deficit

Digitization has changed the way we operate as individuals and as a society in significant ways, with this change accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital technologies are now treated as ‘imperative’ across many spheres of life. A by-product of this digitization has been datafication, as formerly analogue phenomena need to be translated into data in order to digitize them. As our daily social, professional, administrative, and civic interactions have taken on a digital dimension, the data generated about these transactions are recorded and analysed for insights. The data generated by your morning coffee purchase might therefore reveal your location, your appetite for early mornings, and your price sensitivity, amongst many other insights. The aggregation of such insights across all your daily activities can create remarkably in-depth profiles of individual behaviour.