The Circuit Court in Adentan has ruled that Bolt Holdings OU, the data processor for the ride-hailing platform Bolt, must pay a lecturer and Chief Executive Officer of a software solutions company, Justice Noah Adade, GHS 1.9 million as damages for identity theft. The court presided over by Her Honour Sedinam Awo Kwadam, found that the company failed to detect the theft 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 his own photograph and details being used for the driver 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 his identity and successfully registering himself as a driver on the Bolt app in 2022. The plaintiff’s engagement with the second defendant through his lawyers yielded no fruitful results by way of compensation. Thus, the instant suit.
The lecturer sued Bolt Ghana Limited as the 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 Bolt’s failure to undertake this check amounted to a breach of its duty of care owed to the data subject (plaintiff).
Her Honour Mrs Kwadam, in her judgment dated September 18, 2024, also held that the failure on the part of the defendant amounted to non-compliance with Section 20 of the Data Protection Act, which bars data processors from processing personal data without the prior consent 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 from seeing himself as a Bolt driver operating over an uncertain period of time.
The court added that this amounted to damage to his reputation, forcing him to expend resources to seek legal redress while dismissing claims by Bolt that it had acted diligently and took reasonable care.
“All organizations, big or small, that 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 to prevent unscrupulous people from using their platforms and systems to place ordinary citizens of Ghana at 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 held that the plaintiff succeeded in his action and ordered Bolt to pay GHS 1.9 million as compensation. In addition to the compensation, the court also directed that an additional GHS 20,000 be paid to the lecturer for his legal fees.
The court further directed the Data Protection Commission to ensure a forensic audit of Bolt’s systems and database to check the accuracy of the identity of all its drivers up until March 2024. The commission is also to extend the audit to all other ride-hailing platforms in the country.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/Murtala Inusah
