Case Explained: Recording Strangers Without Consent Is Becoming Ghana’s New Crime – Legal Perspective

The camera is always ready. Someone’s phone is always pointed. And increasingly, Ghanaians are appearing in videos and photographs that they never agreed to be in, circulating on social media platforms to audiences they never consented to reach, with consequences that sometimes last far longer than the content itself.

What began as a cultural shift, the casual normalisation of recording everything in public, has evolved into a pattern of behaviour that legal experts say is not only ethically corrosive but potentially criminal under Ghanaian law. The personal stories are already accumulating. A man photographed asleep on a bus, snoring, woke to find the video had been posted online and discovered by his daughter. Another was captured in a clip he had no part in, circulated without his knowledge or permission. A third watched a bystander continue recording a sensitive hospital situation even after being explicitly asked to stop, only to discover himself in the published footage afterward. Families, according to those documenting the trend, have been torn apart by videos that misrepresented what actually happened, with no mechanism for the people shown to correct the record before the damage was done.

These are not hypothetical harms. They have a legal framework that should, in principle, prevent them. Article 18(2) of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution guarantees every citizen a fundamental right to privacy, and the Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843) operationalises that right in the digital context. Act 843 provides individuals with more control over how their personal information is processed, requiring that data collection be fair, for a specified purpose, and based on the consent of the person concerned or another legitimate legal basis established by law. Under Act 843, identifiable images and video recordings constitute personal data, and where intimate content is involved, it qualifies as sensitive personal data requiring explicit consent before any lawful processing.

The consequences of violating these provisions are real. Act 843 imposes both civil and criminal liabilities for non-compliance, with offences including the unlawful disclosure of personal data. Penalties include fines, imprisonment, or both, and the Data Protection Commission (DPC) is empowered to impose administrative sanctions including suspension or cancellation of a data controller’s registration. Selling or offering to sell the personal data of another person constitutes a specific offence under the Act, punishable by a fine of not more than 2,500 penalty units, a term of imprisonment of not more than five years, or both.

The law has been tested in its most acute form recently. The Ghana Association of Privacy Professionals (GAPP) condemned the non-consensual recording and publication of intimate content involving Ghanaian women by a foreign national, describing the act as a grave violation of privacy and personal dignity. GAPP called on the Ministry of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, the Data Protection Commission, the Cyber Security Authority, and the National Communications Authority to conduct swift and thorough investigations. It also noted that beyond Act 843, such conduct may constitute offences under the Cybersecurity Act 2020 (Act 1038), including unlawful interference with privacy and cyber harassment.

The challenge, as information technology consultant Osbert Nii Okaitey Okaitey observed, is that the commercialisation of social media has fundamentally altered the incentive structure. Content generates income. High-view videos generate more income. The financial reward for sharing something that draws attention is immediate, while the legal consequences, even if they exist in statute, require a complainant to know their rights, a regulator to act, and a court process to complete before any accountability materialises. In the gap between those two timelines, the video stays online and the harm compounds.

Ghana’s international obligations reinforce the domestic legal framework. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) both protect individuals against arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home and correspondence, and affirm the right to legal protection against such interference.

The practical instruction is straightforward: the fact that a recording is made in a public space does not automatically make it lawful to publish online. Consent, purpose, and context govern whether sharing content crosses from participation in public life into violation of private rights. Ghanaians should be aware that they can file a complaint with the Data Protection Commission, and that the law exists to protect them. Whether the relevant authorities make that protection real, consistently and visibly, remains the open question.