Privacy policy

This policy explains what Local Egypt (“we”, “us”) collects when you use the site, why, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do with it. It applies to every visitor, in Egypt or elsewhere. Short version: we collect very little, we never sell personal data, and most pages work without any account or cookie at all.

Effective 3 October 2026.

1. Information we collect

1.1 Information you give us

You can read the whole directory without telling us who you are. We collect personal data only when you:

• Create an account: e-mail address, display name and a salted password hash (never the password itself), plus a two-factor secret if you enable it;
• Add or claim a business: your name, work e-mail, phone number, your message and any documents you send us for verification;
• Contact us or report content: whatever you put in the message.

1.2 Information collected automatically

• Server logs: IP address, user agent, requested page and time, kept for security and for a short period (section 3);
• Outbound clicks: we count clicks on business website links per listing; the count is not linked to you;
• Quick-search questions: what people type into the search box or the assistant is stored as text with a counter, without any IP or identifier, to improve the parser;
• Approximate location: when the assistant suggests places near you, it uses the country and city hint our CDN attaches to the request, or coordinates you explicitly share by tapping “Use my location”. Neither is stored.

1.3 Business listings

Listings contain business contact details that are already public: name, address, phone, website, opening hours, Google rating and the latest public reviews as shown on Google Maps. Where a sole trader’s name is the business name, that name is part of the listing. To correct or remove a listing, use the notice and takedown process.

2. How we use information

• To run the site and keep it secure (logs, rate limiting, abuse prevention);
• To operate your account, claims and listings and to e-mail you about them;
• To verify that a claimant represents a business (claim verification policy);
• To answer messages and reports;
• To improve search and the assistant, using aggregated queries;
• To show advertising (section 7) and to meet legal obligations.

We do not send marketing e-mail. Transactional e-mails (claim decisions, password resets) are the only messages you receive.

Legal bases. Where the law asks for one, we rely on: performance of a contract or of steps you asked for (accounts, claims); our legitimate interest in running a secure, accurate directory; your consent, where you gave it (location sharing, personalised advertising); and compliance with legal obligations. In Egypt, our processing follows the Personal Data Protection Law No. 151 of 2020 and its executive regulations, supervised by the Personal Data Protection Center. We also respect the Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law No. 175 of 2018, which protects the privacy of private and family life and makes it an offence to publish photos of people or information about them that violates their privacy without their consent. We collect the minimum, state the purposes and retention above, and do not sell personal data. Visitors from the EU and the UK. Where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the UK GDPR applies to you, we honour the rights it gives you in the same way, and the legal bases listed above are the ones we rely on under it.

3. Retention

• Server logs: 30 days;
• Verification documents: deleted within 30 days of the claim decision;
• Account data: until you delete the account, then removed within 30 days except records we must keep by law;
• Listing edits and claim records: for as long as the listing exists, so we can show who changed what;
• Aggregated statistics and query counters: indefinitely, because they identify nobody.

4. Sharing and disclosure

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing. We share only with:

• Infrastructure providers: our hosting provider and our CDN and security provider (Cloudflare), which see the traffic needed to deliver the site;
• Advertising partners such as Google AdSense, which set their own cookies as described in section 7;
• Google, whose image servers deliver listing photos directly to your browser (we send no referrer, and we do not send them who you are);
• Authorities, when required by law or a valid legal process, or to protect the safety of a person;
• A successor, if the site changes hands, under this same policy.

5. International transfers

The site is hosted on cloud servers that may be located outside Egypt and served through a global CDN, so data may be processed outside the country you live in, including in countries whose laws differ from yours. We choose providers that commit to appropriate contractual and technical safeguards, consistent with the rules of Law No. 151 of 2020 on transferring personal data outside Egypt, and we limit what leaves our servers to what is needed to run the site.

6. Your rights and choices

Whatever your country, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal data we hold about you and give you a copy;
• correct it;
• delete it, or delete your account (you can also do this from your account page);
• restrict or object to a particular use, including to any processing based on legitimate interest;
• withdraw consent you gave earlier;
• receive the data you provided in a portable format;
• object to decisions taken solely by automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you (we do not take any such decisions);

To exercise a right, email us from the e-mail address on the account, or with enough detail for us to find your data. We reply within 30 days, sooner where the law requires. We may ask you to confirm your identity and may decline requests that are manifestly unfounded or repetitive. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may lodge a complaint with the Personal Data Protection Center, the authority established by Law No. 151 of 2020 to supervise personal data protection in Egypt. Visitors in the European Union or the United Kingdom may also complain to the data protection authority of their own country.

Children. The site is not directed at children under 18 and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child gave us personal data, tell us and we will delete it.

7. Cookies and similar technologies

We set very few cookies of our own and no cookie banner is needed for them because they are strictly necessary or store a choice you made:

Advertising cookies. Where advertising is shown, Google AdSense and its partners may set cookies to show and measure ads, including personalised ads where you have consented in your Google settings. We do not control those cookies. You can opt out of personalised advertising at adssettings.google.com, and browsers let you block or delete cookies; the directory keeps working without them, you may simply see non-personalised ads.

No analytics trackers. We do not use third-party analytics scripts. Our traffic figures come from our own server logs, aggregated.

8. Security

Passwords are stored as salted hashes, accounts can be protected with two-factor authentication, admin sessions require it, the site is served over HTTPS only, and requests are rate-limited. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will tell you and, where required, the Personal Data Protection Center and other competent authorities, within the time limits the law sets.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the site changes. The effective date at the top tells you when. Material changes are announced on the site, and by e-mail to account holders where the law requires it.

10. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: email us. Some links on this site are affiliate or sponsored links. If you book or buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.