Nineteen human rights organizations issued a joint statement Monday calling on Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) to backtrack on any directives requiring mobile service users to submit biometric data to telecom providers.
The signatory organizations demanded an immediate halt to forcing users to provide facial scans, fingerprints, or other biometric identifiers as a condition for registering, managing, or recovering mobile phone lines, accessing the “Arqami” (My Numbers) service, or disputing SIM cards registered under their names without their knowledge.
They warned that imposing sensitive data collection before identifying the root cause of recent registration breaches shifts the burden of systemic oversight failures onto the public while creating technical infrastructure vulnerable to future surveillance and profiling.
The joint demand follows the regulator’s announcement on Aug. 10 referring Egypt’s four mobile operators—Vodafone, Orange, E&, and WE—to the Public Prosecution for criminal investigation into instances of SIM card registration using citizens’ personal data without their knowledge or possession.
On Aug. 11, NTRA Executive Vice President and spokesperson Mohamed Ibrahim confirmed the authority received more than 4,000 complaints regarding unauthorized phone lines registered under citizens’ names.
However, the rights groups highlighted that the NTRA has failed to disclose the confirmed number of unauthorized registrations or clarify the specific operational stage and mechanism that enabled the data abuse.
The authority has also not clarified whether the breaches stemmed from identity theft using another person's national ID card at sales outlets, employee or agent abuse of authority, or tampering with activation devices, accounts, or internal company records.
The joint statement emphasized that without isolating where and why the system failed, there is no justification for claiming biometric verification resolves the crisis. “Biometric matching may help establish that the person carrying out a transaction matches the identity associated with a specified reference record,” the groups noted in their statement.
“On its own, however, it cannot prevent employees or agents from misusing their access privileges, lines from being added or records altered unlawfully within operators’ systems, or from the reuse of previous verification results,” they added.
Highlighting the permanent risks of biometric collection, the statement noted that unlike passwords or identification documents, which can be changed or replaced, individuals cannot alter their face or fingerprints if their data is leaked or compromised.
Combining permanent biometric identifiers with telecom subscription records creates a technical framework capable of cross-linking personal datasets for future surveillance or user profiling.
To restore integrity without compromising privacy, the organizations called on the NTRA to publish aggregate investigation findings detailing confirmed cases, system failure points, and the involvement of sales outlets, staff, and activation devices while protecting victim identity.
The statement also urged regulators to mandate that telecom companies establish tamper-proof, immutable audit logs for every line registration, ownership transfer, or SIM replacement, allowing every transaction to be traced directly to the point of sale, employee account, activation device, timestamp, and any subsequent modification.
