Telefónica, S.A.
Headquartered in Spain, Telefónica provides mobile and fixed-line broadband and telecommunications services to more than 349 million customers in Europe and Latin America.
Despite leading our telco ranking for the fourth consecutive time, Telefónica recorded its first transparency decline1 in several key areas since RDR began evaluating it more than 10 years ago.
Telefónica made changes to its framing of human rights governance that contributed to this outcome. Most notably, the company narrowed its disclosures on the processes it uses to assess how its services affect human rights. Telefónica’s public documents no longer list a credible human rights organization that would serve as an external assurer of its assessments, and the scope of those assessments no longer explicitly covers the enforcement of privacy policies or terms of service. This compounds concerns stemming from the company’s earlier retreat from the Global Network Initiative (GNI). Together, these problems led to the first decline in Telefónica’s overall governance score in the history of our assessments.
This backsliding coincided with structural changes. The government of Saudi Arabia, which has engaged in severe human rights violations, purchased a significant stake in Telefónica in 2023. Simultaneously, the company moved forward with its long-term plan to stop doing business in Spanish-speaking Latin America. By early 2026, it had sold its operating companies in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, with further plan to exit the Venezuelan market.
As judicial interpretations strengthened net neutrality in Europe, the company also abandoned a long-standing public voluntary commitment to treat all traffic fairly in Latin America.
Since Telefónica’s last evaluation, the proliferation of generative AI has brought with it new risks and underscored the importance of transparency and accountability in emerging technologies. Telefónica remained the only ranked telco that both made a clear commitment to human rights with regard to artificial intelligence and disclosed the implementation-level policies it had in place to meet it. Further, the company heeded our 2022 recommendation to strengthen security practices protecting user data. These are reminders that Telefónica is capable of continued progress on human rights and transparency, even as some of its peers are rapidly catching up.
The 2026 RDR Index: Telco Giants Edition covers policies that were active on August 31, 2025. Policies that came into effect after August 31, 2025 were not evaluated for this ranking.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Telefónica’s governance score dropped for the first time in the history of our evaluations. It stopped commissioning the social responsibility-focused company BSR to conduct its human rights impact assessments, switching to the consulting firm Deloitte (G4). It also deleted its commitment to consider the effects of enforcing its own policies in those assessments (G4b). The company stated generally that it engages with civil society on issues related to its business (G5). However, it has yet to return to the multistakeholder GNI or publish evidence of increased engagement efforts to compensate for its withdrawal in 2022 (G5). GNI’s accountability mechanism protects telecommunications users from rights-violating government demands.
The company published the rules it enforces across its systems and services, including for advertisers (F3). However, it did not comprehensively list the reasons it might suspend an account (F3a) nor publish any data about how often it enforced the rules (F4). It was one of only two ranked telcos to publish operational-level policies on the use of algorithmic systems (F1d). Telefónica was transparent about its process for addressing government blocking demands (F5a) but stopped releasing data about them in an analysis-ready format for researchers (F6). Its freedom of expression score dipped as it walked away from its global commitment to net neutrality (F9).
Telefónica’s policies addressed often-neglected issues such as training algorithmic systems (P1b). Fulfilling RDR’s recommendations for Telefónica from RDR’s last telecom assessment in 2022, the company began disclosing that it monitors employee access to user information (P13) and committed to promptly process external reports of security vulnerabilities without taking legal action against those who raise them (P14). At the same time, it watered down its existing commitment to employ user information only for the purpose it was collected (P5). In particular, it allowed its staff to use this data more freely to infer new information about its customers (P3b), without promising the latter a clear and comprehensive way to opt out (P7).
1 Telefónica’s overall performance declined compared with the previous evaluation. However, its final score remained unchanged from the previous year due to score adjustments, as RDR reevaluated several elements. These revisions offset the underlying decline in performance, resulting in a stable overall score despite a decrease in the company’s substantive level of transparency.