Egypt

Summary

Egypt presents elevated risk for web crawling involving personal data and moderate risk for pure content scraping. The Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law No. 175/2018 broadly criminalises unauthorised access to websites, accounts, and information systems (Art. 14), including where access is "intentionally or unintentionally" — an unusually low threshold that creates material exposure for automated crawling and whose practical scope against lawful public-page crawling is genuinely uncertain and untested. Art. 7 additionally authorises blocking of websites threatening national security or damaging the Egyptian economy. The Personal Data Protection Law No. 151/2020 (in force October 2020, implementing regulations issued 2021) requires explicit consent for personal-data processing; there is no meaningful publicly-available-data exemption; fines up to EGP 5,000,000 plus criminal penalties apply. Egypt has no EU-style sui generis database right; databases attract only compilation-originality copyright protection under the Intellectual Property Law No. 82/2002. There is no TDM copyright exception. Egypt ratified the African Union Malabo Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection, which entered into force June 2023, though Malabo adds no directly enforceable scraping-specific rule beyond domestic law. No English-language case law on scraping is available.