Telenor ASA
Headquartered in Norway, Telenor Group offers mobile and fixed-line broadband services to 160 million customers across the Nordic countries and Asia as of 2026.
Despite some improvements in its overall transparency, Telenor only ranked 6th this year, as MTN and América Móvil rose above it in the ranking. The company continued to show strength in governance practices, but persistent weaknesses remained in its transparency on privacy and operational accountability.
In 2022, after the military coup in Myanmar, Telenor sold its subsidiary in the country to Lebanon’s M1 Group, which in turn handed off its operations to a conglomerate linked to the Burmese military. Years later, the company continued to face scrutiny for the practices of its former Burmese subsidiary and the human rights impacts of its decisions.
Telenor launched an Expert Forum in 2023 “to explore possible future dilemmas Telenor may face in respecting human rights.” The following year, the Norwegian National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct found that Telenor had breached international standards on human rights due diligence in Myanmar. The report reinforced concerns about how the company manages severe risks when operating under authoritarian regimes. These problems intensified in 2025, when investigations and lawsuits alleged that Telenor had shared data with Myanmar’s military authorities that enabled arrests and abuse.
Meanwhile, strategic retreats, mergers, and consolidations accelerated in the company’s other operating markets. Telenor’s Malaysian subsidiary Digi merged with Celcom in 2022 and became the country’s largest operator. By early 2026, the company had also sold its entity in Pakistan and mostly divested from its counterpart in Thailand, leaving Grameenphone in Bangladesh as the sole remaining telco in Asia in which Telenor holds a majority stake. We found slight improvements in Telenor’s reporting on government user data requests, but the broader impact of its divestments on transparency remains unknown.
In this year’s assessment, Telenor improved its human-rights-centered AI commitments through its new Principles for Responsible AI. The company’s results also reflected increased regulatory scrutiny of how it governs privacy. In March 2025, Norway’s Data Protection Authority fined Telenor over shortcomings in the organization and independence of its Data Protection Officer role, highlighting gaps in internal controls.
Overall, Telenor’s disclosures demonstrated leadership in certain telecom-specific areas, such as network shutdowns. However, the Myanmar case remained a defining test of whether transparency and governance structures could translate into credible protections when human rights risks escalate dramatically and the foundations of accountability break down.
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.
Telenor performed relatively strongly on governance, ranking third in this category behind Telefónica and MTN. It continued to disclose details about its internal oversight structures and employee implementation mechanisms (G2, G3). The company also strengthened its commitments related to algorithmic systems governance through an overarching human-rights-centered Responsible AI policy (G1). However, its jurisdiction-level legal and regulatory human rights risks disclosures relied on outdated public reporting that has not been updated in recent years (G4a).
Telenor placed third in this category, again behind Telefónica and MTN. The company continued to outperform many peers in telecom-specific areas of transparency, particularly around shutdown-related practices and handling of government demands, which remained salient given Telenor’s operations in higher-risk jurisdictions (F10). However, it remained less transparent about algorithmic system use and enforcement. Although it published a report on how it uses AI for network security and briefly explained its internal principles overseeing this use of AI, it provided no information about the adoption of AI in other areas (F1d).
Telenor’s privacy protections showed modest improvement, including somewhat stronger but still limited disclosure about when the company shares certain user information (P4). Despite this progress, Telenor ranked in the bottom half among the telecom operators we evaluated on privacy. This is especially notable given the Norwegian Data Protection Authority’s 2025 sanctions related to the organization and independence of Telenor’s Data Protection Officer function. The results point to persistent gaps in Telenor’s transparency on privacy issues, even amid increased regulatory and reputational scrutiny.