Law note · Qatar
Personal Data Privacy Protection Law, special-nature personal data
What it requires
- An app processing a data category the PDPPL treats as special in nature (ethnic origin, children's data, health, physical or psychological condition, religious creeds, marital relations, or criminal offenses) about an individual in Qatar must obtain permission from the Competent Department; Qatar's PDPPL does not currently name biometric data as its own special-nature category, so an app processing a voiceprint or faceprint should not assume this permission requirement applies without a further check of any ministerial decision that may have added it.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
What we found
Art. 16 lists ethnic origin, children's data, health, physical or psychological condition, religious creeds, marital relations, and criminal offenses as "Personal Data with Special Nature."
Biometric data is not named, unlike the UAE, Saudi, Oman, and Jordan statutes researched in this batch, a real gap rather than a research omission: the Minister may add other categories by decision where misuse could cause serious damage (Art. 16, para. 2), but no evidence that this power has been exercised for biometric data was found.
Processing special-nature data requires "permission from the Competent Department, as per the measures and controls determined by a decision issued by the Minister" (Art. 16, para. 3), and a violation carries the higher QAR 5,000,000 penalty tier under Art. 24.
A voiceprint or faceprint might be captured under "physical... condition" by a stretched reading, but that fit is not textually confirmed, so this document does not code Qatar's PDPPL as reaching biometric identifiers as a heightened category.