Deutsche Telekom AG
Headquartered in Germany, Deutsche Telekom offers mobile, broadband, and other services in more than 50 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, with a core customer base of about 248 million mobile users and 22 million broadband lines.
Deutsche Telekom earned the second-highest privacy score of any telco evaluated, but ranked near the bottom in freedom of expression. The company published no data about government or private demands for content or account restrictions, or about its process for policy enforcement. In 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled that Deutsche Telekom’s “StreamOn” zero-rating service violates European Union rules on net neutrality. In April 2022, the service was banned by German regulators, who gave the company until March 2023 to fully discontinue it. The service undermines the company’s own policy commitment to net neutrality, a key component of freedom of expression online.
Despite the company’s growing use of targeted advertising, it had no clear policies in place governing how it helps target or display ads, and failed to show that it assesses the potential human rights impacts of ad targeting. In mid-2022, Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. operating company, T-Mobile, began selling information to advertisers about customers’ app downloads and web browsing history, information that can reveal intimate details about a person, such as sexual orientation. Meanwhile, in Europe, in a bid to find new ways to track users for advertising amid the declining use of third-party tracking cookies, Deutsche Telekom began a trial of TrustPid, a “supercookie” system that links granular data to a user’s phone number and IP address.
Though the company’s privacy score remained high, it slipped from first to second place in the category as Spain-based Telefónica made significant improvements. Deutsche Telekom deleted a description, previously available on its website, of its process for handling government demands for user information. This is particularly worrying for users of the company’s subsidiary in Hungary, where evidence suggests that the government spies on dissidents and journalists. Additionally, U.S. operating company T-Mobile has not clarified how it may respond to overbroad government demands for user information related to the prosecution of abortion seekers following the 2022 Supreme Court decision reversing abortion rights.
T-Mobile U.S. has suffered seven data breaches in the last four years. Despite a comparatively strong score on its responses to security breaches, Deutsche Telekom did not clearly explain how it would mitigate the harm done to users by these events.
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.
Deutsche Telekom’s governance policies did not address board-level oversight of digital rights issues (G2) or human rights impact assessments in key issue areas (G4b-c,e). The company published a report that partially addressed the need for due diligence on the use of algorithmic systems (G4d), but it did not clearly extend its human rights commitments to cover its use of these technologies (G1).
Deutsche Telekom performed significantly worse on freedom of expression than on governance and privacy. The company disclosed nothing about its processes for responding to third-party demands (F5) or for restricting content or accounts based on either government (F6) or private requests (F7). The company also failed to clarify its process for responding to demands to shut down networks (F10), which gave it one of the lowest scores of the companies evaluated in this category.
Deutsche Telekom’s privacy score was the second highest in this ranking. It was one of only two companies to receive any credit on the accessibility of its algorithmic use policy due to its publication of guidelines on AI (P1b). It also had the highest score of any company on indicators related to the handling of user information (P3–P9). However, the company removed a policy regarding its process for responding to government demands for user information (P10a) and generally revealed less about how it responds to such demands (P10) than its European competitors.