Qatar
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Qatar presents medium-high risk for web crawling. Qatar was the first GCC state to enact a comprehensive privacy law: the Personal Data Privacy Protection Law (PDPPL, Law 13/2016), in force since 2017 and actively enforced since at least 2024. Enforcement authority is the National Data Privacy Office (NDPO), operating under the National Cyber Security Agency (NCSA), which issued compliance rulings in December 2024 and March 2025. Financial penalties range from QAR 1,000,000 to QAR 5,000,000. The Cybercrime Prevention Law (Law 14/2014) criminalises unauthorised access to websites, information systems, and networks, with up to 3 years' imprisonment and fines up to QAR 500,000, increasing for government or critical-infrastructure targets. A 2025 Cybercrime Law amendment (Law 11/2025, in force from its Official Gazette publication in August 2025) added Art. 8 bis criminalising the publication or circulation of images or video of individuals in public places without consent — this is not a PDPPL amendment. Qatar's copyright law protects databases under a compilation-originality standard; no EU-style sui generis database right exists, and there is no TDM exception. No scraping-specific case law is publicly available.
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 | broad criminal |
| Public-page carve-out | no |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | closed list |
| 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 | Qatar PDPPL (Law 13/2016); NDPO/NCSA oversight; Cybercrime Law 14/2014 as amended by Law 11/2025 (Art. 8 bis — image/video privacy in public) |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-24. Confidence: medium. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.