Automated decision-making and profiling are becoming more prolific and changing in nature. What began with police photography and Habitual Criminal Registers has reached a new crescendo with computer vision and data science. Law has struggled to adequately regulate these technologies and practices. Where it has been successful, law constrains profiling by protecting ‘identity’. However, in the contemporary technological environment, the notions of identity that animate the legal thinking and the notions of identity that animate the data science and profiling are markedly different. This chapter introduces the argument that these contradictory ways of thinking about people is why the law has struggled to introduce meaningful regulation in this field. It introduces the metaphor of the ‘world state’, the process by which the world and the people within it are translated into the computational world, and asks what law needs to do as the world state becomes more prominent.