Vodafone Group Plc.
Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Vodafone Group provides mobile, fixed-line, and other telephony and internet services across 22 countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In late 2022, the company had 114 million mobile subscribers in Europe and 185 million in Africa.
Facing continued pressure from investors over its financial performance, Vodafone has been restructuring, engaging in deals to merge some of its businesses and sell others. In May 2022, United Arab Emirates-based telecommunications and technology group e& (formerly known as Etisalat and also evaluated in the Telco Giants Scorecard) bought a 9.8% stake in the company for $4.4 billion.
In August, the company announced a non-binding agreement to sell its Hungarian business to a local company with close ties to the government, a move seen as helping Prime Minister Viktor Orbán consolidate his influence over the telecom industry. Meanwhile, Vodafone Idea (Vi), the India-based telco of which Vodafone Group is a minority shareholder (47.61%), approved a plan that would make the Indian government its largest shareholder, with plans to divest at a later time. As of late 2022, Vi was India’s third-largest telecom operator but had been experiencing a steady decline in its subscriber base. This acquisition comes amidst the Indian government’s unexpected withdrawal of a proposed data protection bill in the world’s fastest growing internet market.
Vodafone, like other European telcos we rank, launched a trial of TrustPid “supercookies” in spring of this year. TrustPid attaches tokens to users based on IP addresses and is considered an alternative to third-party tracking. While Vodafone is seeking to expand its targeted advertising business, it has continued to fail at providing clear information about its targeted advertising rules.
The company dealt with a number of incidents related to weak security in 2022. It faced a cyberattack that briefly disrupted its services in Portugal but which did not result in any customer data being compromised. More than 20 million Vodafone users in India were allegedly affected by a data breach due to vulnerabilities in the company’s systems. Since 2018, Vodafone has been the only company to share a comprehensive policy for responding to data breaches, including a commitment to notify authorities and affected users.
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.
Vodafone had the second-highest overall governance score among telcos. But it did not make any improvements in this category since the 2020 RDR Index. It continued to lag behind many of its peers in human rights due diligence and did not share whether its assessments covered risks and impacts associated with existing services, policy enforcement, algorithms, targeted advertising, or zero-rating programs, including Vodafone Passes (G4b, G4c, G4d, G4e).
Vodafone continued to share more about its policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and information than any other telco, with the exception of Telefónica. But it still did not provide information on advertising content and targeting policies beyond stating that it enables third parties to target its users with advertising content (F3b, F3c).
Vodafone earned the fourth-best privacy score among telcos. It relaunched its reporting of data on government demands to access user information (P11a). While Vodafone once again revealed more about how it protects the security of users’ data than any other telco, it was less clear about how it addresses security vulnerabilities than it was in the 2020 RDR Index (P14).