América Móvil, S.A.B. de C.V.
Headquartered in Mexico, América Móvil provides wireless service to 286.5 million users in more than 20 countries throughout the Americas and Europe.
América Móvil expanded significantly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It acquired 13 million new Brazilian subscribers by buying assets of the struggling local telco Oi, leaving the company with more users in Brazil than in its home country of Mexico. The company also launched a vast new5G network.
Along with these expansions, América Móvil made improvements in transparency, earning it the second-largest score increase of the 12 telco giants we rank. The company published its first transparency reports in 2021, providing new information about how it handles government demands for content restriction, network shutdowns, and user information. While not comprehensive, it was the first stand-alone transparency report published by a telco based in Latin America. The company also published a new company-wide privacy policy that included its first commitment to privacy impact assessments. The policy also promised to uphold various ethical principles in América Móvil’s use of algorithmic systems, though it did not directly reference human rights. The company remained opaque about its policies for handling user information and about its advertising policies and practices.
Meanwhile, América Móvil's major European subsidiary, A1 Telekom, has faced scrutiny over the 2020 network shutdown imposed in Belarus during mass pro-democracy protests. In its home country of Mexico, América Móvil’s subsidiary Telmex faced its first strike in 40 years, with thousands of unionized workers staging a walkout in July. Workers demanded that Telmex fill vacant positions that left them with increased workloads, and alleged that the company had routinely engaged in “coercive measures such as withholding wages, and [retirement] benefits, [and] physical and verbal attacks.” In Mexico, Telmex provides fixed-line and satellite telecommunications services alongside cell service provided by América Móvil’s other domestic subsidiary, Telcel. As of publication of this scorecard, the company and its workers have not reached an agreement.
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.
América Móvil made a general commitment to protect users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights (G1). It also published a new ethical statement covering its development and use of algorithmic systems (G1), but stopped short of a clear commitment to human rights in this area. The company disclosed its first ever privacy impact assessments (G4a), but neglected to assess risks to freedom of expression, or the human rights impacts of its targeted advertising, policy enforcement, algorithmic systems, and zero-rating practices (G4b–e). It continued to lack any mechanism for proactive engagement with the people whose rights are affected by its business (G5).
América Móvil improved more in freedom of expression than in any other category. The company explained its process for handling external demands for content and account restrictions for the first time (F5a, F5b). This included incomplete information about how it would handle a government demand to temporarily cut off internet access in a given area (F10). It disclosed nothing about the number of demands it receives for website blocking or internet shutdowns (F6, F10). Its European subsidiary A1 is known to have carried out an internet shutdown in Belarus in 2020, but the company did not include information about A1 in its transparency report.
The company did not disclose a process for enforcing its own rules on its network (F3a) or disclose data about the volume of restrictions enforced (F4a, F4b). Neither did it disclose any advertising content or ad-targeting rules (F1c, F1d). Although it published a policy in favor of net neutrality principles, it did not maintain this commitment in practice, operating a zero-rating program for WhatsApp, Uber, and other popular services (F9).
América Móvil’s new privacy policy disclosed that users can obtain some of the information the company holds about them (P8). This was a step in the right direction, but the company remains one of the most opaque among the 12 giants we rank with regard to its use of user information (P3–P9). It also provided no information about the steps it would take to address the impact of a data breach on its customers, beyond notifying them when legally required to do so (P15).
The company improved its transparency around external demands for user information; its new transparency report included detailed descriptions of its process for handling them (P10a, P10b). But it failed to provide country-by-country numbers detailing the demands received (P11a), instead combining data from multiple countries, making it far less useful.
[1]Access Now’s global Transparency Reporting Index shows that, as of July 2021, no other Latin American telco had released a transparency report.