Egypt must drop its biometric mandate for mobile users

Skyline International for Human Rights condemns the direction Egypt's National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) is now pushing mobile operators toward, requiring subscribers to hand over their facial images or fingerprints just to keep or manage a phone line. What started as a response to a wave of complaints from people who discovered mobile lines and, in some cases, linked mobile wallets registered in their name without their knowledge has turned into a plan that puts the burden and the risk squarely on the public.

On 10 August 2026, NTRA announced it had referred Egypt's four mobile operators to the Public Prosecution over these unauthorized registrations and, in the same breath, instructed those same operators to speed up the rollout of biometric verification through their apps. Days earlier, Al-Watan reported that NTRA is preparing a facial recognition system to confirm the identity of anyone buying a mobile line or using the "My Numbers" lookup service inside the My NTRA app. NTRA has also had to walk back a related feature after users could not access it, restoring a temporary version of My Numbers while it finishes building the biometric layer, an admission that the system is being pushed out even as the basics are still being worked out.

A fix in search of a diagnosis

Nowhere in these announcements has NTRA said how many people were affected, at what point in the registration process the failures happened, or whether the cause was stolen national ID cards used to impersonate someone else, insider abuse by employees or agents at operator branches, or tampering with records inside the operators' own systems. Without that basic accounting, the public is being asked to accept a sweeping new form of data collection for a problem whose actual cause has never been named, let alone proven.

What NTRA is proposing instead is that citizens hand facial images or fingerprints to the same four operators and to whichever service providers those operators choose to work with. This is a materially more sensitive category of data than the identity information those operators were already mishandling when the unauthorized registrations occurred in the first place, inside their own sales and activation processes. Asking the companies just referred to prosecutors to now take on a central role collecting an even more sensitive class of personal data is not a fix grounded in evidence. It shifts the cost of an institutional failure onto the very users that failure harmed.

Someone who discovers a line was opened in their name without their consent would now need to submit biometric data they can never take back just to prove the error and get it corrected, while NTRA has offered no assessment of whether operators or their contractors can actually secure this data and no indication of who would be held responsible if it were leaked or reused for something other than verification.

Biometric identifiers are not like a PIN or a lost ID card. A face or a fingerprint cannot be reissued once it leaks or is misused, and once it sits in a database, it can be linked to a person for the rest of their life, and to other records about them, even if the original photo or scan is never kept. Egypt's own Personal Data Protection Law, No. 151 of 2020, treats biometric measurements as sensitive personal data and only permits their processing where it is necessary for a specific, legitimate purpose and limited to what that purpose requires, a threshold this plan has not been shown to clear.

That law itself draws its legitimacy from Article 57 of the Egyptian Constitution, which declares private life inviolable and shields personal data and communications, whether letters, calls, or electronic correspondence, from unauthorized collection or disclosure, while also guaranteeing citizens' right to use public means of communication. A policy that makes access to a phone line conditional on surrendering unchangeable biological data sits uneasily against both the statute and the constitutional guarantee it is meant to implement.

Consent that is not really a choice

Refusing to scan a face or a fingerprint, or failing a biometric match, risks losing access to a phone line altogether or being locked out of the very tools meant to let people correct false registrations. When saying no costs someone their phone service, agreeing to hand over a face scan is not really a free choice. A mobile number in Egypt today is tied to schooling, healthcare, banking, and dozens of other government services delivered through the Digital Egypt platform, which grew to 210 government services during 2025 according to official figures. Being unable to recover a lost line would be more than an inconvenience, it would cut people off from services they rely on daily.

Older people, persons with disabilities, and anyone without a smartphone or steady internet access will carry the heaviest cost of a system built without them in mind, a pattern the UN Secretary-General's report on new technologies and economic, social and cultural rights has already flagged, warning that digital identity systems built around costly enrollment or fingerprint capture become a source of exclusion for exactly these groups.

A wider tightening of digital control

This push for biometric verification does not exist in a vacuum. Just weeks earlier, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly announced plans to further regulate social media, including reviewing legislation, raising fines, speeding up prosecutions, and activating a new monitoring unit inside NTRA itself to track online "violations." Journalists, rights defenders, political critics, content creators, and ordinary users in Egypt already live with prosecution under sweeping charges built around false news, misuse of social media, terrorism, and vaguely defined "family values."

Placing a biometric identity layer inside the same regulator that is now being handed new powers to police online speech, with no clear legal limits on who can access that data, for how long, or for what purpose, opens the door to exactly the kind of function creep where a tool sold as subscriber verification ends up repurposed for identification, monitoring, or investigation of the very people already targeted under these broad speech laws.

Skyline International for Human Rights calls on the Egyptian government and NTRA to:

• Withdraw any directive that ties a facial scan or fingerprint to registering, renewing, or recovering a mobile line, to using the My Numbers service, or to disputing or recovering an account, and to bar NTRA, mobile operators, and their service providers from collecting or holding biometric data for these purposes at all.
• Guarantee a working non-biometric alternative for every one of these processes, including in-person verification with an original ID document, with assisted procedures for older people, persons with disabilities, and people in remote areas.
• Publish, in aggregate, the findings of the investigation into unauthorized line registrations, including how many cases were confirmed, where in the process the failures occurred, and what role retail outlets, employees, or compromised user accounts played.
• Require operators to keep a tamper-proof log of every registration, notify people the moment a line is opened in their name, offer a free and documented way to dispute unauthorized registrations, and hold operators accountable for their branches and agents, including for correcting inaccurate records and compensating anyone harmed.