Ola Electric has responded to a legal notice by a Guwahati resident whose son had met with an accident on Ola’s e-scooter about a month back. Ola had earlier shared the telemetry data on social media to prove its innocence, which the complainant claimed was in violation of privacy as per his agreement with the company.

He had sent a legal notice asking the company to take down the post sharing the telemetry data. The company has now responded to the notice by sending a counter notice and asked Singh to ‘cease and desist from making any defamatory posts’ and delete all ‘negative’ social media posts that he has made against Ola Electric within 24 hours.

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Last month, Balwant Singh had tweeted that his son Reetam had an accident in March due to faulty regenerative braking system in the Ola S1 Pro scooter. He claimed that the scooter accelerated instead of slowing down on deceleration. He mentioned that Ola’s representatives had taken the scooter to collect data for investigation.

Ola then came out with its defence on April 22 sharing telemetry data on social media platforms suggesting that the scooter was being driven rashly and there was nothing wrong with the scooter or its regenerative braking system.

"We did a thorough investigation of the accident and the data clearly shows that the ride was overspeeding throughout the night, and he braked in panic, thereby losing control of the vehicle. There is nothing wrong with the vehicle," Ola said in its statement.

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Singh objected that the company did not respect his data privacy rights. He said that as per an agreement that he signed with Ola, the sharing of data was only for private access and sharing it on social media is in breach of the agreement.

A notice was sent to Ola, which said, "You are hereby notified to take down the telemetry data of my scooter from your social media accounts across the internet at the earliest failure to which I will be bound to take legal action against your company."

This drew a massive backlash on social media against Ola and sparked a debate regarding data privacy prompting the manufacturer of the e-scooter to send a counter notice to Balwant Singh asking him to take down all the negative, defamatory posts shared on social media.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)

First Published:May 12, 2022 2:14 PM IST