PERSONAL DATA AS AN OBJECT OF CIVIL LAW REGULATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51989/NUL.2026.3.9Keywords:
personal data, information, objects of civil rights, personal non-property rights, privacy, informational self-determination, consent, civil remedies.Abstract
The article examines the civil-law nature of personal data and clarifies their relationship with information, personal non-property benefits and proprietary objects. The study addresses the absence of a coherent model in the Civil Code of Ukraine concerning a natural person’s rights in relation to information about that person, despite the recognition of information as an object of civil rights and the existence of a special statutory regime for personal-data processing. The legal characteristics of personal data, the identifiability criterion, the contextual nature of classifying information as personal data, and the distinction between personal, confidential and anonymised information are analysed. It is argued that the economic value of data does not justify treating personal data as property. The reproducibility and non-rival nature of information, the possible connection of a single record with several persons, and the inalienability of the basic guarantees of data subjects are inconsistent with a proprietary model. The article proposes distinguishing personal data as a specific type of information from the set of subjective civil rights that a natural person exercises in relation to the lawfulness of their processing. The personal non-property core of these rights is linked to privacy, personal autonomy and informational self-determination. Consent is characterised as a unilateral expression of will rather than a contract or a universal legal basis for processing. The limits of freedom of contract are examined, and the claim that a user “pays with personal data” is shown to be economically descriptive but legally imprecise. Civil remedies are considered, including termination of unlawful processing, rectification or erasure, prohibition of dissemination and compensation for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage. Proposals are made to coordinate the Civil Code of Ukraine with special data-protection legislation without introducing a model of “ownership of personal data”.
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