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Inaugural Lecture by Professor Michael Veale. Computers can now competently reason about text and images. What was content is now data. What does this mean for digital rights? Data protection emerged to tackle the asymmetry of informational power arising from large, bureaucratic filing systems and electronic databanks. Over time, as the computer became personal, people began to live their lives through digital text, photos, videos. These artefacts often fell within the scope of the law, even though computers could not reason well about their contents in the same way they could reason about an indexed population register. Significant legal tensions, such as over informing individuals and giving them agency over text and media connected to them, have haunted case law and regulators for decades. Yet in the meantime, computers were becoming more and more able to characterise and manipulate this data, by seeing it as a high dimensional vector – transforming, often called embedding, rich qualitative content into millions or billions of numeric features. In some ways, the move to digital qualitative content has come full circle to computationally tractable, tabular data like the databanks of old. This has most clearly been seen in the use of qualitative content both in artificial intelligence (in particular, large language models) and recommender systems on social media. The logic of seeing qualitative data this way is rapidly spreading across the public and private sector and reshaping modern computational practices. Yet just because computers now can process qualitative data more capably, does not mean the law has regained a vocabulary or set of tooling to easily govern it. On the contrary, there are significant issues this creates for understanding and realising the scope, rights and obligations of both data protection and other more recent data law regimes. In this lecture, Professor Veale will characterise these issues, and suggest how the law must adapt to ensure we can achieve its missions of protection and power redistribution.

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