The Circuit Court at Adentan has ordered Bolt Holdings Ou, the data processor for ride hailing platform Bolt to pay a lecturer and Chief Executive Officer of a software solutions company, Justice Noah Adade an amount of GHS 1.9million as damages for identity theft.
This was after the Court presided over by Her Honour Sedinam Awo Kwadam had found that the company had failed to detect the stealing of the lecturer’s identity and its subsequent use by a driver.
It is the case of the Plaintiff – Justice Noah Adade that on August 1, 2022, he ordered a Bolt ride on his phone and found himself, his photograph and his details being the driver thereon who was responding to pick him up.
According to him, when the ride arrived, it was his own employee, one Peter Walker, who was driving the vehicle.
The Plaintiff said, Peter Walker confessed to stealing the identity of the Plaintiff and successfully registering himself as a driver on the Bolt App as a driver in 2022.
The Plaintiff’s engagements with second defendants through his lawyers yielded no fruitful results by way of compensation for the Plaintiff. Thus the instant suit.
The Lecturer suit Bolt Ghana Limited as first defendant and Bolt Holdings OU as the second defendant.
The Plaintiff in his action, asked the court to find that Bolt had been negligent in failing to verify the identity of the driver hence allowing the identity theft to take place.
The Court found that Bolt was required by Ghana’s data protection Act to undertake a liveliness identity verification check when registering a prospective driver.
With this not done, the court said the failure for Bolt to undertake this check amounted to a breach of its duty of care owed to the data subject (Plaintiff).
Her Honour Mrs Kwadam im her judgmwnt dated September 18, 2024 also held that the failure on the part of the defendant also amounted to non-compliance with Sections 20 of the Data Protection Act which bars data processors from processing personal data without the prior con- sent of the data subject unless the purpose for which the personal data is processed is necessary for the purpose of a contract to which the data subject is a party.
This, the court said subjected the Plaintiff to emotional distress and trauma for seeing himself as a Bolt Driver operating over an uncertain period of time.
And this the court added amounted to a damage to his reputation forcing him to expend resources to seek legal redress while dismissing claims by Bolt that it was diligent and took reasonable care.
“All organizations, big or small who have the privilege of processing the personal data of people must live up to the high standard of care expected of them by statute and general public safety policy in order to prevent unscrupulous people from using their platforms and systems to place ordinary citizens of Ghana at the risk of their identities being used for purposes they never consented to” Her Honour Sedinam Awo Kwadam said in her judgment.
Orders
Consequently, the court hold that the Plaintiff succeeded with his action and ordered Bolt to pay GHS 1.9 million as compensation.
In addition to the compensation, the court also directed that additional GHc20,000 should be paid to the lecturer as cost of his legal fees.
The Court has further directed the Data Protection Commission to ensure a forensic audit of Bolt’s systems and data base to check the accuracy of the identity of all its drivers up until March 2024.
The commission is to also to extend the audit to all other ride-hailing platforms in the country.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm
