"Private Law of Data: Concepts, Practices, Principles & Politics" is a research project funded by Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021, project no. 2020/37/K/HS5/02769. The project is being realized at the Chair of Philosophy of Law and Legal Ethics, Faculty of Law and Administration, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The Project's team is led by dr. Przemysław Pałka. 

The goal of the project is to advance the scholarly understanding of how private law facilitates the emergence and the functioning of the data society, as well as to clarify the distinction between legal and political questions regarding its governance.

The project addresses the problem of how private law already facilitates and governs the data society. Instead of looking at the law as a reactive force that must respond to, and "keep up with", the exogenous technological changes, this project posits private law as one of the driving forces behind the rise of the data society, working together with economic incentives and technological capabilities of various actors. The overall hypothesis is that private law contributes to the functioning of the data society (for good and for bad) through its: (i) conceptual vagueness and austerity surrounding "data" about humans; (ii) institutions of contract and property enabling corporations to privately create norms allowing them to amass data about humans and use it to extract value from the marketplace; (iii) the implicit assumption that data collection is a good thing.

Project’s activities are divided into four work packages, organized around four specific research questions: