Privacy has been said to be a concept in an utter mess. In his influential treatise, The Rights of Publicity and Privacy (2nd ed., 2005), J. Thomas McCarthy laments: "It is apparent that the word 'privacy' has proven to be a powerful rhetorical battle cry in a plethora of unrelated context. Like the emotive word 'freedom', 'privacy' means so many different things to so many different people that it has lost any preciselegal connotation that it might once have had" (at para. 5.59). Data Protection Law in Singapore, edited by Professor Simon Chesterman, is a timely and muchwelcomed collection of essays that not only address myriad perspectives on the issue of data protection, but also provide tantalising views on the challenges to privacy and sovereignty brought about by the digital revolution. Singapore enacted the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 26 of 2012) [PDPA] on 15 October 2012 and it came into effect on 2 January 2013, with businesses given 18 months to comply before the PDPA became enforceable on July 2014. The book's examination of the way in which Singapore has responded to the problems brought about by data collection, aggregation, use and dissemination in the 21st century through the enactment of the PDPA will no doubt be of great interest to practitioners, policy makers and legal scholars.

“Sustainability” is very much on the world’s agenda today. At the recently-held 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, Sir David Attenborough warned that the stability of the Earth’s climate, which had for millennia enabled human civilisation to flourish, is being seriously threatened by human activity in recent times. It is more urgent than ever that humanity must, in Sir Attenborough’s words, “rewrite our story to turn this tragedy into a triumph”. The notion of “sustainability”, however, is not strictly confined to climate or environmental issues. Embedded in most definitions of sustainability are concerns for social equity and economic development. And in this latter regard, the world has had to grapple with the COVID-19 Pandemic, which has profoundly impacted human life on earth over the last two years. As the United Nations (“UN”) noted, “[the Pandemic] is much more than a health crisis. It is a human, economic and social crisis. The coronavirus disease … is attacking societies at their core” (UN Sustainable Development Group, Shared Responsibility, Global Solidarity: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19).