Tanzania

Summary

Tanzania presents moderate crawling risk. The Cybercrimes Act No. 14 of 2015 s.4 criminalises intentional and unlawful access to a computer system; publicly accessible pages carry implicit authorisation so the offence is unlikely to be triggered by crawling open content, but a ToS prohibition or robots.txt disallow can help establish unlawfulness. The Personal Data Protection Act 2022 (PDPA, in force 1 May 2023, administered by the Personal Data Protection Commission — PDPC) applies to collection of personal data including from publicly available sources; public availability does not exempt processing. The PDPC extended the registration grace period to 30 April 2025 (final extension); active enforcement began thereafter. A 2024 High Court ruling (Tito Magoti petition) found certain PDPA consent- exception provisions ambiguous and ordered Parliament to amend them within one year or face striking out; these provisions relate to lawful-basis definitions rather than the core access-offence framework. The Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act No. 7 of 1999 protects original compilations on an originality basis; fair dealing is narrow (personal/private use, quotation, education, news). No sui generis database right; no TDM exception. No scraping-specific case law exists. Tanzania has NOT ratified the AU Malabo Convention.