Introduction
In its simplest definition, big data refers to extremely large datasets that are difficult to process using traditional methods. Processing and leveraging such data require advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence applications and high-capacity infrastructure.
The sheer scale of big data presents boundless opportunities for leveraging its potential. Advanced analytical methods and tools for processing large datasets can extract precise insights across diverse domains. This empowers individuals and organizations within these fields to devise policies and make decisions based on accurate information, thereby significantly enhancing their chances of success.
One valuable insight derived from big data is accurately identifying the specific needs of a population group in services such as education or healthcare. This information can be utilized to develop policies that precisely address these needs, thereby increasing the likelihood of their success and reducing the resources used to meet actual needs. This approach also helps minimize the waste of resources that would otherwise have been allocated to address non-existent needs.
As a developing country facing numerous challenges with limited resources, Egypt’s adoption of big data could significantly impact its economic growth, provide essential services to citizens, and improve the overall quality of life and living standards.
At the same time, Egypt faces chronic challenges in democratic reform, separation of powers, and ensuring fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression and privacy. Egypt suffers from surveillance practices, widespread internet censorship, blocking of internet websites, and monitoring and violation of individuals’ privacy.
Under these circumstances, concerns arise about misusing big data analytics at various levels. Therefore, any genuine benefit from big data that accrue to citizens requires strong protections for their rights regarding their data. This includes regulating the collection, storage, and processing of data in ways that prevent misuse that could harm their interests and rights.
This paper discusses various aspects of the potential optimal utilization of big data in the Egyptian context. It first explores the prospects of this utilization in both the government sector and the private sector. Then, it delves into the requirements for using big data in the best possible manner.
The paper also reviews the factors that facilitate leveraging Egypt’s existing big data. Finally, it addresses the concerns and threats that should be considered when harnessing big data, emphasizing the need to protect citizens’ rights and fundamental freedoms.
The Prospects of Leveraging Big Data in the Egyptian Context
Big data promises a significant transformation in the approaches and methods used for policy-making, whether by governments and their institutions or private enterprises, particularly industrial or service-oriented economic institutions.
Big data mechanisms integrate with traditional methods, such as surveys and statistics, to facilitate a deeper understanding of the impacts of various policies in real-time during their implementation. This contributes to the formulation of evidence-based policies. Additionally, big data modifies the policy-making lifecycle by enhancing stages such as problem identification, formulation, implementation, and evaluation.
The paper discusses in the following section what optimal utilization of big data can achieve in Egypt across various service sectors. It focuses specifically on the education and health sectors due to their significant importance and the considerable potential for leveraging big data in each of them.
Enhancing the Efficiency of Service Sectors
In Egypt, the service sectors have been plagued by chronic and persistent inefficiency. Multiple indicators point to successive Egyptian governments’ inability to halt the decline in the quality and quantity of basic services. This failure can be attributed to a combination of reasons.
These reasons include policymaking that does not rely on reliable evidence to assess needs accurately and the absence of well-defined plans for policy implementation and follow-ups. Additionally, there is a lack of precise evaluation of the impacts of these policies and an understanding of the reasons for their failure.
From the abovementioned, it is evident that the capabilities offered by big data align with a genuine need in the Egyptian context. Big data provides solutions to Egypt’s governmental service sector problems, specifically addressing policy formulation and implementation deficiencies. Analytical processing of big data can enhance the efficiency of these services throughout the planning, execution, and operational phases.
Education
The government education sector is one of the largest government sectors in Egypt. It suffers from several chronic structural issues, the most prominent of which is overcrowded classrooms and schools. This results from a failure to expand school construction in line with population growth. At the same time, high tuition fees for private education prevent most citizens from relying on it as an alternative.
Furthermore, many rural and remote areas suffer from a lack or absence of educational services. Urban areas, on the other hand, experience a high dropout rate from compulsory education. Moreover, education in Egypt faces other significant challenges, such as weak curricula and inadequate teacher training.
There are several ways in which analytical processing of big data can be leveraged to overcome the previously mentioned challenges. Primarily, it involves creating plans and designing new policies, modifying methods for implementing them and devising new approaches for managing educational facilities and their daily operations.
This can be achieved by building on more accurate information about the real needs regarding their type, size, and spatial and phase distribution. Precise estimates of educational and operational needs prioritize the provision of these needs and reduce expenditures by minimizing wasted resources. This paves the way for innovative alternative methods to meet these needs through tactics such as resource sharing and optimizing the use of local resources.
In this context, leveraging big data can integrate with digital transformation efforts and educational development policies previously implemented in Egypt. Initiatives such as the tablet computer project can contribute to collecting data on students’ performance and recurring weaknesses in the curricula in terms of their comprehensibility.
Incorporating various aspects of big data into the educational process can significantly enhance learning effectiveness. This can be accomplished through a systematic approach that gradually adjusts the learning process to students’ individual needs and response rates at multiple levels. Starting with the classroom teacher, then extending to the school level, and finally reaching the broader scope of planning and policy-making within educational departments and the Ministry of Education.
Big data analysis can also play a crucial role in helping students set realistic career goals. By providing an accurate and objective assessment of students’ abilities in relation to the demands of the labor market, big data contributes to directing students’ academic interests toward fields that align with their strengths and potential career opportunities.
Healthcare
There is a significant similarity between the challenges faced by the healthcare sector in Egypt and those encountered by the education sector. The common denominator between both sectors, alongside severe underfunding, is the failure to formulate, implement, monitor, and evaluate policies based on evidence-derived realities from information grounded in solid evidence.
The availability of such evidence-based policies could have improved healthcare services or at least mitigated their deterioration to some extent. Many of the problems in Egypt’s healthcare sector stem from resource constraints and misallocation, leading to significant wastage of these limited resources without achieving substantial returns.
Relying on reliable information about citizens’ healthcare needs, along with understanding the volume, distribution, and availability of resources, can improve the targeted allocation of these resources to effectively meet priorities. Big data serves as an effective tool for achieving this, especially in the healthcare sector, which can gather vast amounts of data during its daily operations without adding burdens to its workforce.
It only requires digitizing the data collected by healthcare institutions and organizing it hierarchically in terms of centralization. This process begins at the level of individual institutions (health units, clinics, hospitals) and extends to local health administrations and the relevant ministry responsible for service delivery in Egypt.
In addition, integrating big data solutions with other digital transformation initiatives and information and communications technology can enhance healthcare service delivery. Innovative services such as remote diagnosis and treatment may contribute to identifying actual needs and directing resources toward the most critical priorities by leveraging insights derived from big data analytics.
Big data solutions can automate many daily operations in healthcare, such as monitoring patients with chronic diseases, regularly providing medications, and identifying those who need medical review due to concerning changes in their vital signs. Such solutions can potentially reduce overcrowding in hospitals and healthcare units, ensuring better utilization of available material and human resources.
Big Data Requirements
Leveraging big data does not arise in a vacuum but requires several essential prerequisites. These requirements are necessary to enable and enhance its leveraging, ensure maximum benefit from it, and address potential negative aspects. In this section, the paper discusses some of the most important requirements.
Comprehensive Digitization
Making data available in digital form is a necessary requirement for utilizing big data. Therefore, progress in digitizing various processes is essential to providing more data in a format that can be incorporated into big data sets, thus enabling its utilization.
Comprehensive digitization requires all governmental and private institutions to transition from traditional data collection and storage methods in paper form to digital formats. This often involves re-entering existing data currently available in paper form, requiring technological and human resources in many cases.
At the same time, it is important to facilitate the process of accessing data directly in digital formats without the need for re-entry. Therefore, comprehensive digitization also involves providing the necessary hardware and software to facilitate data entry operations in various conditions and situations.
Egyptian governmental institutions have made significant efforts towards digital transformation. Most government agencies today rely on storing data in digital formats. However, traditional methods for gathering information are also continued.
Most government institutions still require their clients to fill out paper forms to obtain data from them before transcribing this data or entering it, relying on automated methods or the human element. In both cases, this represents a waste of resources and a high risk of errors in data entry processes.
Hence, data entry processes need to be digitized so that they are closer to their source. This can be achieved by digitizing the various application processes and transferring them to the Internet. This saves a lot of time and effort, makes data collection easier, and reduces the possibility of errors.
Providing the Necessary Infrastructure
The concept of big data revolves around the collection, storage, and processing of vast amounts of data that may originate from diverse sources and geographic locations. Therefore, big data requires robust infrastructure for storage and processing, including advanced data centers with large storage capacities and high processing capabilities.
Additionally, communications networks and internet services need to be enhanced in performance, as they are vital tools for connecting diverse geographic locations containing data sources to storage and processing sites. Improving this infrastructure is essential to fully leveraging the potential of big data.
Since 2018, Egyptian officials have repeatedly expressed their ambition for Egypt to become a regional and possibly international hub for telecommunications and information technology services. However, up until 2020, global specialized assessments did not view Egypt’s capabilities, especially concerning the number and quality of data centers, as qualifying it to achieve this ambition. Nevertheless, Egypt’s information technology and communications infrastructure has seen significant growth since then, as will be detailed in a later section of the paper.
Education and Training
Big data relies on gathering vast amounts of data from diverse sources, often requiring data collection from individuals who are not necessarily IT specialists. This necessitates a basic level of familiarity with digital technology, which is already present among millions of Egyptians who use mobile phones and interact with the Internet daily.
The extent of specialization, and thus the amount of education and training required, is increasing as the roles in the big data lifecycle change. Daily interaction with data in various institutions demands appropriate training for employees. At a higher level, there is a need for specialists and data engineers, necessitating qualified individuals specifically in these fields. Therefore, providing specialized education in information technology, data management, and AI is crucial to building an effective and scalable big data system to keep pace with its growing demand.
Raising Awareness
Building an efficient big data system requires two aspects of public awareness among citizens. The first aspect is the belief in the importance of big data and the positive impact it can achieve, which is reflected in the availability and quality of services provided to them. This aspect would encourage citizens to provide their data when requested, as well as to ensure the validity and accuracy of this data.
On the other hand, there is a need for citizens to be aware of the various risks that may threaten their safety or interests if any misuse of their personal data occurs, or if these data are breached or leaked. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness about the importance of privacy rights, methods of protection, and precautions to take when providing any personal data to any entity.
Currently, there is a severe lack of awareness among citizens in Egypt regarding the nature of big data, its direct and indirect impacts, and its positive and negative implications on their lives and interests. This lack of awareness not only affects Egyptians’ ability to understand their rights and freedoms related to big data, including its collection, storage, and processing methods but also hinders their potential to benefit from such data truly.
The lack of awareness leads citizens to refrain from disclosing their personal data or to disregard the accuracy and reliability of the data they provide, especially when dealing with governmental institutions. Therefore, there is a need to integrate awareness of rights, particularly the right to privacy, with highlighting the benefits derived from collecting accurate data.
Achieving this requires raising citizens’ trust in the ability of governmental entities to protect their data and ensure it is not used in a way that harms them. This can be achieved through adopting a clear policy that limits the collection of data to the minimum necessary for each purpose. Additionally, strict policies should be followed to anonymize data when used for analytical purposes, ensuring that data cannot be linked back to individuals’ identities.
Legislative Organization
The effective and secure use of big data technologies requires appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks. These frameworks should provide an enabling environment for the growth and development of big data usage while ensuring the protection of individuals’ and institutions’ rights from potential threats and risks that may arise from misuse of big data analytics mechanisms or negligence in securing these data and the information systems used to process them. Such negligence could expose data to unauthorized access or disclosure.
The issuance of the implementing regulation for the Personal Data Protection Law is crucial to activate the law, which has been practically suspended since its issuance. Additionally, regulating the operations of governmental institutions and private sector companies dealing with big data may require amending existing legislation or issuing new ones to ensure optimal benefits and to mitigate risks and threats that citizens, private sector institutions, or the state and its entities may face.
Facilitating Factors for the Development of Big Data
Technological Improvement
In recent decades, Egypt has witnessed significant growth in investment in the communications and information technology sector, although it is not balanced enough. Despite some problems in network efficiency, especially with regard to Internet service, there is widespread use of the Internet and smartphones. This means that Egypt is poised to use big data technologies on a large scale, but questions remain about the sustainability of this growth if existing technical problems are not addressed.
The daily interaction of a large segment of citizens with digital technologies provides a minimal level of familiarity with basic data collection processes. This proliferation can be leveraged by using software interfaces, especially online, to collect data from Egyptian citizens for multiple purposes.
This method represents a more efficient, cost-effective, and convenient alternative compared to traditional data collection methods relying on surveys and questionnaires, whether through face-to-face interviews, phone calls, or filling out forms across various organizations.
Electronic interfaces also provide a more flexible alternative that allows surveys to be tailored according to the diverse circumstances and characteristics of participants. They enable comprehensive explanations to participants about the purpose of the survey, how the data will be used, and assurances regarding data protection.
Availability of Skills and Experience
The state’s focus on educating and training professionals in the field of information technology, alongside increased student interest in these specialties, has led to an increase in the number of specialized institutes and colleges in this field. Consequently, there has been a rise in the number of qualified graduates prepared to work in the communications and information technology sector.
This availability of local expertise allows organizations aiming to adopt big data technologies to rely on the necessary competencies to meet their needs, whether through direct employment or by engaging specialized service providers.
Infrastructure Growth
In recent years, Egypt has witnessed many infrastructure projects in the communications and information technology sector, with a clear focus on establishing advanced data centers. Last April 28, Egypt launched its largest data and cloud computing center to date, which is located on Ain Sokhna Road.
According to Egyptian officials, this center aims to achieve three main objectives: digital transformation, building digital capabilities, and supporting digital innovation. The center utilizes fiber optic networks and 4G and 5G technologies to gather data from various sources. Additionally, it employs artificial intelligence platforms and big data analytics to process and provide valuable, actionable insights to meet the needs of government institutions in Egypt.
State Interest
The Egyptian state expresses interest in developing the telecommunications and information technology sector, with a particular focus on leveraging the potential of big data and providing the necessary requirements to enable its utilization. In addition to paying attention to infrastructure and education and training programmes, the state has put relevant strategies and policies into effect in cooperation with local and foreign entities in the private sector.
In previous statements in 2018, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Yasser El Kady, affirmed Egypt’s ambition to become a global hub for data. The minister highlighted the ministry’s strategy of attracting more investments and global data centers. At the same time, officials from the Egyptian Telecommunications Company announced their goal of making data centers represent a quarter of their annual revenues within five years. At that time, the company owned four data centers and was in the process of establishing two additional ones.
However, there is inconsistency in the government’s focus on developing some areas of communications and information technology compared to others. For example, Egypt still ranks low in internet connection quality, whether through landlines or mobile phones. User experiences also indicate that actual speeds are much lower than advertised.
Foreign Partners Interest
Egypt is considered a large and promising market for leveraging big data. Major global companies such as IBM, Oracle, and Huawei show particular interest in this market. This interest is evident in the creation of new specialized data engineering jobs in Egypt.
The interest in the Egyptian market by global technology companies has two aspects. On one hand, it opens the door to leveraging the vast technological expertise and capabilities of these companies to serve development in Egypt. However, on the other hand, in the absence of clear regulations to protect data and regulate its market in Egypt, this interest could lead to exploitative practices that undermine the rights of citizens, particularly privacy rights. Additionally, it could hinder the growth of local entities in the government, private sectors, and civil society working in the field of big data.
Challenges, Concerns, and Caveats
Limited Material and Human Resources
Despite the significant influx of investments in the communications and information technology sector in Egypt over the past decades, the available resources are still insufficient to achieve optimal utilization of big data capabilities.
Achieving optimal utilization remains an evolving goal, as the resources required to achieve it increase over time. Therefore, the challenge related to resource limitations is a constant one, demanding careful planning to increase these resources in line with the expected continuous growth in the demand for leveraging big data and expanding its use.
Legislative Shortcomings
The delay in implementing the Egyptian Personal Data Protection Law due to the absence of its implementing regulations poses a significant barrier to regulating data usage in Egypt. This threatens the interests of citizens, government institutions, and private enterprises, creating an environment of uncertainty and distrust. Consequently, this discourages investments from entering the Egyptian data market despite its attractiveness.
In addition, the law suffers from a lack of provisions that regulate various aspects of the big data economy, especially those related to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that surpass traditional data processing capabilities. AI technologies are extensively used in analyzing big data, making it difficult to predict their capabilities and analytical capacities, thus complicating the anticipation of potential misuse for criminal purposes. This raises serious concerns about their impact on individual rights and the security and safety of public and private institutions.
These challenges are exacerbated by the constantly evolving and changing nature of big data technologies, making it difficult for traditional legislative approaches to keep pace with these advancements. Therefore, it requires the establishment of flexible legal frameworks that include mechanisms for licensing, oversight, and monitoring of big data analytics processes, alongside setting general controls that allow for the detection of potential harmful uses of data. Furthermore, these legislations should undergo regular review and updates to keep up with the rapid developments in this field.
Concerns and Threats Related to Human Rights
Collecting, storing, and processing big data raises legitimate concerns regarding the threat to fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens, foremost among them the right to privacy. Protecting citizens and their rights requires enhancing the legislative and legal framework, implementing policies for oversight, accountability, and regular auditing of data-related activities. Additionally, it is essential to train and educate the workforce in this sector, instilling a culture of respect for rights and ensuring their continuous pursuit of best practices in their work.
On the other hand, raising awareness among citizens about the risks and potential threats to their privacy, as well as their rights related to their personal data voluntarily provided or collected indirectly, is crucial. This includes their right to prior knowledge and explicit consent for the collection of their data, understanding the purpose of its collection, and their rights to correct, amend, or erase this data in accordance with regulatory laws.
Citizens’ awareness not only protects their rights but also contributes to creating a favorable environment for harnessing big data while providing necessary protection for the security of public and private institutions. The nature of big data analytics mechanisms makes misuse of personal and private data a direct threat not only to institutions but also to national security itself. The evolution of big data and other digital technologies establishes a close relationship between protecting individual rights and safeguarding institutional and national security.
Security Concerns and Threats
Big data is a relatively new field whose full potential has yet to be fully explored, and its future capabilities cannot be predicted, especially with the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence technology that introduces new tools and methods for processing and analyzing data. There are already indicators and past incidents demonstrating the potential misuse of big data in various ways, some of which pose security threats to individuals, institutions, and even national security of countries.
The concerning issue is that it is almost impossible to predict in advance the information that can be extracted by big data analytics tools from specific datasets. The capabilities of these analytical tools are almost limitless, especially in linking information available through the analysis of multiple datasets from various sources.
Some entities that control data, such as ride-sharing service providers through mobile applications, and many companies developing mobile applications and operating systems, have access to types of data that may not seem sensitive at first glance, especially if these entities anonymize them. However, through analyzing this data and integrating information extracted from it with other datasets, it is possible to compromise users’ privacy and uncover their identities. Additionally, intelligence can be derived by collecting and analyzing information targeting specific domains within datasets.
The current laws in Egypt, including the Personal Data Protection Law, do not fully address these types of threats. Therefore, addressing these threats requires either enhancing existing legislation or enacting new laws to regulate data sharing with third parties, as well as the processing and analysis of big data specifically.
Monopoly Possibilities and Their Consequences
There are several forms of monopolizing the data itself or monopolizing the tools for processing and analyzing it, thus generating information that can be exploited for different goals. Major technology companies have significant competitive advantages that enable them to achieve unfair monopolies in data markets. The Egyptian market is vulnerable to monopolistic practices that may hinder local sector growth and could compromise important local interests to external agendas.
The most prominent model is companies such as Meta, which owns the social networking and chat networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta has billions of people using its services, thus collecting an unrivaled amount of data, which makes it possible for third parties to exploit it for money. Meta’s monopoly on this amount of data may make benefiting from it more expensive than the financial resources available to the party wishing to use it. This may hinder many uses of big data, some of which may be important and some of which may be necessary.
On the other hand, government institutions enjoy a similar monopoly over data that they alone can collect through their daily functions. While the government itself is the primary beneficiary of using this data, it is not the only possible beneficiary. Individual researchers, academics, research and academic institutions, civil society organizations in all fields, as well as private sector institutions, can greatly benefit from analyzing government data.
In the absence of a freedom of information law, despite its constitutional mandate according to the 2014 Constitution, there is nothing compelling Egyptian government institutions to make their data available or regulating how this data should be made accessible. This situation leaves the availability of such data entirely at the discretion of the government institutions themselves, which typically lean towards limited disclosure, often withholding raw data and retaining the right to release only aggregated statistical information or other selectively chosen data for mostly promotional purposes.
The other aspect of the problem of data monopolization is the possibility that the entity controlling the data may selectively disclose it to external parties after processing, filtering, or manipulating it in a way that renders the extracted information either useless or misleading. In such cases, no other party can verify any manipulation of the data since it resides solely with the controlling entity, and access is only possible through permissions granted by that entity. The only solution lies in having laws that mandate the data controller to provide access for scrutiny in case of suspicion of manipulation. However, even in this scenario, the ability to verify remains limited.
Conclusion
Big data is a cornerstone of the digital age, where data serves as its fundamental building block. Data is no longer just an auxiliary tool for developing strategies and policies in both governmental and private institutions; rather, it has increasingly become the backbone of institutional operations. Therefore, meeting the requirements for leveraging big data is not merely an additional advantage sought by societies but a vital necessity for their survival and progress.
This paper briefly reviewed the potential of leveraging big data in the Egyptian context, both in the governmental service sector and in the private sector. It also discussed the essential requirements necessary to enable the effective utilization of big data.
In addition, the paper discussed the key factors that support utilizing big data in the Egyptian context. Furthermore, it addressed the challenges, concerns, and threats that may arise from the misuse of big data or neglecting the necessary precautions to protect individuals, institutions, and the state itself from the risks of criminal exploitation of big data.