Jurisdiction Guide
United Arab Emirates Privacy & Data Protection Laws
Every regime below can apply to a business handling United Arab Emirates residents' data, depending on whether you have an established presence there, actively offer goods or services to residents, or monitor their behavior. This is a general reference, not a determination for your specific business — run the full questionnaire to see which of these actually apply to you.
Comprehensive Privacy Law · 1
Applies to entities established in the UAE (regardless of where data subjects are located) and, extraterritorially, to entities outside the UAE that process personal data of individuals inside the UAE, including in connection with offering goods/services or monitoring behavior. Excludes government data/public entities, personal/household-use processing, and health or credit/banking data already governed by its own sector legislation; the data-protection authority (the Bureau) also has discretionary power to exempt entities that don't process large volumes of personal data.