Pakistan

Summary

Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 (PECA) is the principal cyber law; it is broad and broadly construed. Section 3 criminalises unauthorised access to any information system or data (fine up to PKR 50,000 or 3 months imprisonment or both); §4 addresses unauthorised access to secure data (up to 6 months or PKR 100,000 or both); §5 covers unauthorised copying or transmission (up to 6 months or PKR 100,000 or both). The Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025 introduced additional regulatory controls (Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority, SMPRA) and stricter penalties for false information; §§3-5 unauthorised-access provisions remain operative and unchanged. Pakistan's Personal Data Protection Bill (approved by Cabinet April 2023) had not received parliamentary assent as of the as_of_date; Pakistan therefore has no comprehensive data-protection statute in force as of mid-2026. No TDM copyright exception under the Copyright Ordinance 1962. No relevant case law on web scraping. Enforcement has focused on political speech and press-freedom cases rather than data-collection scraping. Overall — moderate caution warranted; PECA's broad 'any information system' language creates theoretical public-page risk though enforcement posture does not target benign crawling.