AT&T Inc.
Headquartered in the United States, AT&T offers voice, data, and pay TV services to more than400 millionusers in the U.S. and Mexico. It is the world’s largest telecommunications company by revenue.
AT&T made modest policy improvements since the 2020 RDR Index, but not enough to challenge Vodafone for second place in our ranking. Following one of our recommendations from the 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index, the company improved its process for human rights impact assessments and clarified its handling of government demands to restrict content or accounts.It also decided to end its domestic zero-rating program in order to comply with California’s 2018 net neutrality law.
Telcos often retain data about their customers, which can be accessed by law enforcement. A fall 2021 public records request revealed that AT&T retains such data for seven years after it is generated, longer than other American telcos, many of which kept this data for two years or less. Nevertheless, AT&T has not published a policy on data retention. Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion rights, AT&T declined to clarify how its policy on government demands for user information would be applied to abortion-related cases. Still, it admitted to receiving over 100,000 requests for data from law enforcement officials in the second half of 2021. The U.S. continues to lack a federal privacy law, but RDR has endorsed the proposed American Data Privacy and Protection Act, introduced in the U.S. Congress in June, for its strong protections.
In 2022, AT&T sold its primary advertising division, Xandr, to Microsoft, though it held onto some advertising operations. AT&T still fails to assess the human rights impacts of the targeted advertising operations it has retained or to clearly explain how it regulates ads.
The 2022 Telco Giants Scorecard covers policies that were active on June 1, 2022. Policies that came into effect after June 1, 2022, were not evaluated for this scorecard.
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.
AT&T made a full commitment to board-level oversight of digital rights issues (G2). The company conducted some assessments (G4) of the human rights impacts of government regulations on freedom of expression and privacy (G4a) and of its use and development of algorithmic systems (G4d). Yet it failed to provide any evidence of due diligence with regard to the human rights impacts of its policy enforcement (G4b), targeted advertising (G4c), and zero rating (G4e).
AT&T received the most credit of any company on the availability and accessibility of its terms of service (F1a) and ad-targeting policies (F1c), but none for its ad-content (F1b) or algorithmic-use policies (F1d), which it failed to provide. The company made a full commitment to net neutrality and ended its zero-rating programs (F9), but disclosed very little about its process for responding to government demands to shut down or restrict services (F10).
AT&T was one of very few companies we rank that disclosed anything about what user information it infers (P3b), though it shared nothing about how long it retains this information (P7). It was the only company that received full credit for its process for responding to government demands for user information (P10a). It was also one of the most transparent companies we rank on government demands for data (P11a). As with all companies we rank, with the exception of MTN, it published no data about private requests for user information (P11b). AT&T’s disclosure about its response to data breaches failed to explain how it would mitigate the harm done to users when it experiences a breach (P15).