Ghana
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Ghana has a well-established data-protection regime for the region. The Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843) applies to all automated and non-automated processing of personal data, enforced by the Data Protection Commission. The Cybersecurity Act 2020 (Act 1038) criminalises unauthorised computer access; "unauthorised" is defined to exclude implicit authorisation from publicly accessible systems, but no case has addressed public-page crawling specifically. The Copyright Act 2005 (Act 690) uses a closed-list fair-dealing model (research, private study, criticism, news) with no TDM exception; Act 690 also protects databases as original compilations but does not create a sui generis database right. The Electronic Communications Act 2008 (Act 775) contains ancillary computer-offence provisions. Ghana is an ECOWAS member; the ECOWAS Supplementary Act A/SA.1/01/10 (2010) on data protection is binding but Act 843 is more specific. Overall — non-personal public-page crawling is tolerable; personal-data scraping requires a lawful basis under Act 843; copyright must be respected.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | without permission |
| Public-page carve-out | unsettled |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair dealing narrow |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | prohibited |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | none |
| Privacy regime | Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843) / Data Protection Commission |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-23. Confidence: medium. Not legal advice.