Watched Without Warrant, Judged Without Appeal: Why I Am Fighting for Our Digital Privacy.

Feature Article Watched Without Warrant, Judged Without Appeal: Why I Am Fighting for Our Digital Privacy.

SUN, 01 NOV 2026

Think about the last time you walked through a busy street in Accra, Kumasi or Takoradi. Think about the phone in your pocket, the Ghana Card in your wallet, and the camera on the pole above you. Now ask yourself a question that most of us never ask: who is watching, who decides, and who can I complain to?

I am a human rights defender, and I have spent years writing about abuses you can see. This one you cannot, and that is exactly why I am writing about it. An invisible abuse needs more people willing to speak.

The Machines That Decide About Us

All over the world, police and security agencies are handing power to software. Cameras match faces to databases. Algorithms flag which neighbourhoods and which people are "risky." Phone-tracking tools and spyware are sold to governments that promise to use them only against criminals.

The trouble is that these systems are often secret, often unregulated, and rarely open to challenge. A person flagged by an algorithm usually cannot see why, cannot test the evidence and cannot appeal to anyone who understands the machine.

Human Rights Watch has spent years documenting how digital tools, from hacking software to facial recognition, are used against activists, minorities and workers. Their 2026 investigations show how big this problem has become.

What Human Rights Watch Found in 2026

In May 2026, Human Rights Watch published a 54-page report called Looking the Other Way. The researchers filed freedom of information requests in all 27 European Union countries to learn who was selling surveillance technology to whom. Their conclusion was blunt: the EU is failing to stop its member states from exporting surveillance tools to governments with well-documented records of spying on activists, journalists and critics.

Reporting on the findings named exports to countries such as Azerbaijan and Rwanda. Five of the biggest exporters, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain, refused to hand over their licensing records at all. Read that again: the companies and governments selling the tools of surveillance would not even tell the public who their customers are.

In August 2026, Human Rights Watch also warned about how surveillance and profiling technology is expanding the abusive power of US immigration agents. They documented agents surveilling protesters and community observers during operations in Minnesota in December 2025 and January 2026. Witnesses told a congressional shadow hearing that such data can be used to profile and intimidate people in ways that chill protest, limit access to essential services and undermine privacy and due process. Congress had just sent large new funding to immigration enforcement without matching safeguards.

In June 2026, Human Rights Watch and other groups urged the UK Home Office to halt an experiment using facial age estimation on children seeking asylum. These are children, and the technology is unproven.

In July 2026, the UN human rights office published a position paper on facial recognition in policing. It acknowledged legitimate uses but called for bans on the most harmful ones. Those include live facial recognition at protests and in other public places, so-called emotion recognition, profiling to predict a person's beliefs or future behaviour, databases built by scraping people's photos without consent, and decisions made by facial recognition alone with no human judgment.

The pattern across all of these is the same. The technology arrives first, and the rules, if any, come years later.

When Regulators Blink

Even the world's strongest attempt at regulation has stumbled. The EU's AI Act was meant to put strict controls on high-risk systems, including AI used in law enforcement, biometrics and border control. In 2026 the EU agreed to delay those rules to December 2027, after pressure from industry. Amnesty International warned that the delay and weakening threaten to undermine the law's protections.

Civil society groups raised another fear. Systems rushed onto the market before the rules apply may escape them for good. If that happens, a delay becomes an exemption, and the people who pay for it are ordinary citizens.

This Is Not Only a Western Problem

Some of my fellow Ghanaians may think this is a story about Europe and America. It is not.

Researchers from the Institute of Development Studies and the African Digital Rights Network have documented Ghana's growing surveillance infrastructure. Known contracts with overseas companies totalled US$184 million, much of it for a "safe city" project that includes CCTV powered by Huawei facial recognition AI. They also noted that new biometric ID systems require citizens to hand over faces or fingerprints. That report is not new, and the infrastructure has only grown since. They pointed to cases where devices were seized by police, and they warned that a democracy can wear away when the state's power to watch grows faster than the public's power to question it.

Article 18 of our Constitution protects every Ghanaian from interference with their privacy, home and correspondence. The Data Protection Act of 2012 sets rules for how personal information may be collected and used. In 2026, our Data Protection Commission declared a year of real enforcement, with inspections, spot checks and complaint investigations. In October 2026, it even moved to review the public disclosure of the personal details of nearly two thousand Ghanaians evacuated from South Africa. I applaud that, and I want to see the same energy aimed at the state's own surveillance tools.

In March 2026, the government announced it is developing a new Data Protection Bill, which may create a stronger authority with more enforcement power. This is our chance, and I do not want us to waste it.

What I Am Demanding

I stand with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the UN human rights office on one principle: powerful technology must not operate in the dark.

I am calling for the following:

1. A Public Register of Every Surveillance Tool Used by Police and Security Agencies

Citizens must be able to learn what exists, who bought it, how much it cost and who supplied it. Secret contracts should be a thing of the past. Ghana should publish the details of its safe city and CCTV contracts.

2. Independent Human Rights Impact Assessments Before Deployment

No facial recognition, predictive policing or mass data tool should go live until experts and civil society have tested it for bias, accuracy and harm.

3. Court-Issued Warrants and Judicial Oversight

The police should not be able to access phone data, location records, camera feeds or devices without a warrant from a judge, with clear limits on how long data is kept and a duty to delete it.

4. Bans on the Most Dangerous Uses

I echo the UN's call to prohibit live facial recognition at protests, emotion-reading systems, profiling that predicts political beliefs, and databases built by scraping our photos.

5. A Human Being, Not a Machine, Must Make the Final Decision

No person should be arrested, refused a service or flagged as a suspect on the word of an algorithm alone, and every person must have a way to appeal.

6. Transparent Export Controls

Countries that make surveillance tools must publish who buys them and must refuse sales to governments that use them to crush dissent. Africa must also ask hard questions of the countries and companies selling to us.

7. A Strong, Independent Data Protection Bill for Ghana

The new law must clearly cover the police and security agencies, give the regulator real power over state surveillance, and guarantee citizens the right to know when their data has been used and the right to seek a remedy.

A Word to My Fellow Citizens

Some will say, "If I have nothing to hide, why should I worry?"

I understand the feeling, but I reject the logic.

Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about protecting the freedom to think, to organise, to worship, to protest and to make mistakes without being tracked by someone with power over you. A society that is watched constantly becomes a society that stays silent.

History teaches that surveillance is rarely used only on criminals. It is used on journalists, on opposition voices, on activists and on anyone inconvenient. The tools being sold today are far more powerful than anything past rulers had.

I am asking journalists to investigate. I am asking lawyers to challenge secret surveillance in court. I am asking Parliament to write strong protections into law. I am asking every Ghanaian to ask one simple question every time a new camera or database appears: who is watching, and who is watching them?

Privacy is not a luxury. It is the quiet foundation under every other right we hold. I will not stay silent while it is taken from us without our knowledge, and I invite you to speak with me.

Reference Sources

Human Rights Watch, Looking the Other Way: EU Failure to Prevent Surveillance Exports to Rights Violators (12 May 2026), plus press coverage naming Azerbaijan, Rwanda and the five countries that refused to share records.
Human Rights Watch, Technology Expands ICE's Capacity for Abuse (6 August 2026).
Human Rights Watch letter on UK Home Office facial age estimation (18 June 2026).
UN Human Rights Office, position paper on facial recognition in law enforcement (July 2026).
EU Digital Omnibus on AI, high-risk rules delayed to December 2027; Amnesty International analysis (April 2026).
Institute of Development Studies and African Digital Rights Network report on surveillance in Ghana.
Ghana Data Protection Commission statements (October 2026); Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843); Government of Ghana announcement of a new Data Protection Bill (2 March 2026).

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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