Missed calls?: It’s time telco giants answered for themselves

By Jessica Dheere

In a world where social media and e-commerce platforms dominate global headlines proclaiming society’s information ills, telecommunications companies can sometimes seem like benign fixtures of a bygone era. They’ve always been there, it feels; they may advertise new plans and offer us new devices, and yet their core function in our lives remains the same, or so it seems. But we should not be deceived.

Telcos play an essential role in our globalized society by being the primary connectors of people and networks. They are most people’s first point of access to the internet, text messaging, and, of course, voice communication. The GSMA, the global representative of the interests of more than 1,000 mobile network operators worldwide, reported this year that 4.3 billion people now use mobile internet. That’s more than half the world’s population, and represents more than twice as many people as use Facebook each day.

Despite featuring far less frequently in the media than many of their Big Tech counterparts, telcos actually wield far more power.

Despite featuring much less frequently in the media than many of their Big Tech counterparts, telcos actually wield far more power.This power comes from three sources: 1) the services they provide, without which most of us could not conduct the business of our daily lives, 2) their complicated relationships with governments, which can compel them to implement government orders that violate human rights, and 3) the data they hold on people, including billing, demographic, location, and behavioral data, is more precise than that gathered by platforms, and therefore more valuable to advertisers and others who seek it. More power often means greater potential to violate human rights.

Government Leverage Increases Telcos’ Potential to Do Harm

Telcos operate only with the permission of the governments in whose markets they offer services, which means they can be highly susceptible to politicization and weaponization of their assets, employees, and services, particularly by authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning regimes. Even companies that have fully embraced their responsibility to respect and promote human rights can be legally compelled to take actions that will compromise their commitments to human rights, such as shutting down a network. This puts telcos in a Catch-22 situation: If they comply, they risk undermining the rights of their subscribers. If they do not, they may risk losing the right to operate in the market or jeopardize their assets and employees. At least 182 internet shutdowns occurred in 2021, according to Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, including many executed by companies we rank or their subsidiaries during elections, protests, and unrest or conflict—times when having access to information and communication channels can be a matter of life or death.

Governments, who often own lucrative mobile operators in whole or in part, also frequently exploit their authority to compel companies to engage in, or enable, mass surveillance and the tracking of specific individuals. They may carry this out in a number of ways, including by ordering the installation of surveillance equipment on a network, demanding the retention or sharing of user data, or by using a mobile app as an all-in-one immigration, ticket, and visa tool, as the Qatari government did for its Hayya App. The package also includes a free SIM card on the Ooredoo network. Visitors must download the app to enter the country and to attend the 2022 World Cup matches. Our partner SMEX, which advocates for digital rights in the Arab region, applied the RDR methodology to evaluate the app and found much room for improvement in its policy transparency.

Finally, across Africa, many governments have begun tying people’s identities to their ability to communicate, forcing telcos to kick mobile users off their plans if they do not agree to link their government ID or biometrics to their SIM card. The practice is being justified under the questionable argument that SIM registration aidslaw enforcement. In reality, it disproportionately harms people who cannot access government IDs or who fear being subjected to discrimination or state violence. SIM card registries also pose a monumental privacy risk. Only about half of African countries have data protection laws in place, according to Uganda-based organization CIPESA, and some even store the data collected in third countries. Recognizing the human rights impact of this practice, South Africa-based telco MTN has included the number of disconnections per country in all of its transparency reports. France-based Orange, which also has widespread operations in Africa, has not.

Telcos are Tech Companies, Too

Beyond undue government influence over their operations, telcos are creating threats of their own making, often following in the footsteps of Big Tech. Telcos commonly use traffic-shaping practices to optimize the flow of data across their networks, with the goal of reducing latency and keeping data flowing steadily. Yet many companies deliberately shape or even distort how information travels in order to prioritize some types of services or content as part of partnerships with Big Tech. These transactions can affect users’ right to access information, such as in the case of zero-rating programs.

Zero-rating programs offer users free access to certain apps, usually as a part of pre-paid subscriptions, effectively driving traffic and data to those apps (and the companies behind them) while limiting users’ awareness of, and incentives to use, other web services, including those offered by both commercial and noncommercial competitors. In some cases, telcos may ban voice over IP protocols (VoIPs), like FaceTime or WhatsApp, on their networks, also eliminating competition. Such tactics violate established principles of net neutrality and have an adverse effect on media pluralism and on people’s rights to access information and free expression. Zero-rating programs are also a primary means of collecting user data, particularly in the Global South, where they are an especially important means of daily communication.

Finally, telcos are adopting the same surveillance-advertising business model as Big Tech, which we already know has contributed to the rampant spread of extremist speech and disinformation. In other words, to compete with these maturing upstarts, telcos are jumping on their bandwagon. They are hoping that they too can profit not only from the services they provide but also from the information they collect, including people’s demographic, location, communications, and behavioral data. They are retaining this data for undisclosed periods of time and using it to target ads via proprietary ad networks, addressable TV, and location-based advertising, among other tactics.

Introducing the Inaugural Telco Giants Scorecard

The recognition that telcos can also be a vector of human rights harms led to their inclusion in the RDR Corporate Accountability Index since its inception in 2015; however, the tech platforms, because they are so much more prominent in the news, have garnered more of our attention in our analysis and recommendations. This year, in part so that we could focus more deeply on the unique attributes of telcos and the specific risks they present to human rights, we split the RDR Index into two parts: the Big Tech Scorecard, released last April, and the Telco Giants Scorecard, the inaugural edition of which debuts here.

As we did with the RDR Index in years past, to produce our first Telco Giants Scorecard, we evaluated the publicly disclosed policies, such as the terms of service and privacy policies, of 12 telecommunications companies in 10 jurisdictions against the more than 250 relevant human rights standards set in the RDR Index methodology. These standards help us assess a company’s policy transparency and are grouped into three categories: corporate human rights governance, freedom of expression and information, and privacy. We use the data collected—after sharing it with the companies for feedback and to correct any errors—to generate company scores, and then rank the companies accordingly. Our aim with the ranking is threefold: First, we seek to encourage transparency, as an essential driver of accountability. Second, we hope that companies will improve their alignment with our standards to earn better scores, creating a race to the top with the protection of human rights as the goal. And third, we offer our standards as a roadmap or checklist for companies to help make improvements easier to achieve.

For both our Big Tech and Telco Giants Scorecards, we compiled report cards for each individual company, and included highlights from the year, key takeaways and recommendations, and explanations of their performance in each category. We also included a look at how their performance has trended over the years. We supplement these report cards with our key findings essays, stand-alone pieces written by the RDR team that aim to call out and contextualize the most interesting insights from our data. You can browse our key findings, including anoverview of the results, year-over-year progress, and deep dives into a range of topics, including net neutrality and zero rating, telcos’ adoption of targeted advertising, and a look at why they perform so dismally on freedom of expression.

Telcos Need to Know We’ve Got Their Number

For the past several years, the rise of big data and Big Tech have deflected much-needed attention away from other actors that wield as much or even more power over people’s ability to realize their rights online. While Big Tech companies still have a long way to go on transparency, our findings show again this year, as they have every other, that telecommunications companies actually disclose significantly less information about their policies and practices affecting users' rights.

As shown in the chart above, Spanish telco Telefónica earned a top score (of 57) among both digital platforms and telecom companies. The second-place telco, UK-based Vodafone, scored lower than the next six digital platforms. Four telecom companies scored lower than the lowest-scoring digital platforms, U.S.-based Amazon and China’s Tencent. Overall, the average score for telecommunications companies is nearly 9 points lower than the average score for digital platforms.

While some telcos, like Telefónica and this year’s most improved companies, América Móvil and MTN, have begun to differentiate themselves from their competitors on human rights, the majority are all but maintaining the status quo. They are, however, paying attention to developments in the ESG (environment, social, and governance) arena. For the first time this year, all companies we rank published reports explicitly covering ESG issues.

Then, in September, the GSMA, proposed 10 key performance indicators to help its member companies measure and improve ESG performance in four categories: environment, digital inclusion, digital integrity, and supply chain. Among the three digital integrity indicators was one drawn directly from RDR’s Corporate Accountability Index methodology that rolls up several of the standards we have set for policy transparency on digital rights. It asks:

Is there a policy specifically covering digital rights protection and transparency, privacy, freedom of expression, government mandates to shut down or restrict access, and/or government requests for data?

Guidance for the indicator, also drawn from our methodology, encourages companies to disclose their digital rights policies and evaluate its terms of service enforcement, ad-targeting content and rules, algorithmic system use, policies for responding to government demands, identity policies, and policies for network management and shutdowns.

The inclusion of RDR benchmarks on digital rights is a milestone, not only for RDR but also for the mobile industry, which is only just beginning to look at risks to digital rights as risk to their bottom lines and reputations. While they have far to go on transparency, if these benchmarks are approved, they mark a decisive step in the right direction, one worthy of these telcos giants and the immense power they hold.