Most companies improved scores in at least one area, and many made significant improvements in the past year. Yet companies still fell short.
By Zak Rogoff
As a group, the 12 telcos we rank improved since 2020 on governance, privacy, and freedom of expression, but they must prioritize transparency to fulfill their human rights commitments and improve their scores.
The 12 telecommunications companies we rank made improvements in all three categories of standards we measure: governance, freedom of expression and information, and privacy. Their scores on freedom of expression still lag behind those in other categories, but showed the greatest rate of improvement. Almost as encouraging as these positive trends is what did not happen: No company’s score declined more than half a point in our ranking.
Even if telcos are not currently garnering the same level of scrutiny as their digital platform counterparts, their policy changes point to an industry-wide acceptance that their activities, including data collection and targeted advertising, could be the focus of more attention soon.
Even if telcos are not currently garnering the same level of scrutiny from media and civil society as their digital platform counterparts, their policy changes point to an industry-wide acceptance that their activities, including data collection and sharing, as well as the use of targeted advertising, could be the focus of more attention soon.
Thanks to new policies from Qatar-based Ooredoo and Malaysia’s Axiata, the 2022 Telco Giants Scorecard marks the first time all 12 ranked telcos have published a general commitment to both freedom of expression and privacy in their operations. The majority of them have also established board-level oversight of these commitments and provided relevant training for staff, but few have effective mechanisms to identify human rights problems before they happen. Similarly, while most ranked telcos conduct impact assessments to understand the effects of laws and regulations on their customers’ privacy and freedom of expression, most of them fail to extend this scrutiny to their own activities.
Average scores in freedom of expression were much lower than in governance and privacy, as has always been the case in our rankings. No telco provided data that quantified its enforcement of its own policies, like closing a user’s account for abuse of the network or rejecting an offensive advertisement it had been contracted to deliver. Net neutrality remains a weak point as well, with only five of the 12 telco giants clearly committing to treat all network traffic equally. Even among those five, Deutsche Telekom, América Móvil, Telenor, and Vodafone undermine their commitments by providing free access to dominant apps through zero rating.
Improvements in freedom of expression were driven by South Africa-based MTN and Mexico’s América Móvil, which both released transparency reports for the first time during our policy review period and explained how they handle external demands for content or account blocking and for internet shutdowns.
Telcos show a concerning shortcoming when it comes to privacy. On average, they are much more likely to disclose their security measures—such as in-house and external technical audits—than they are to provide thorough explanations of whose personal information they use or share and how they do so. UK-based Vodafone and MTN were especially opaque on this score.
Most telcos give users a way to access data about themselves, but fail to provide simple tools for them to comprehensively delete it or determine how it is used. And despite improvements due to MTN and América Móvil’s new transparency reporting, a third of the ranked telcos still fail to disclose how many times governments of the various countries in which they operate demanded data about their users, and why.
Telcos are falling short in two areas with elevated risk to human rights: algorithmic systems, such as those enabled by machine learning, and targeted advertising. No ranked telco has demonstrated the existence of a functioning ad-policy enforcement process by releasing data on the number of ads it rejects for being discriminatory, misleading, or otherwise objectionable. Only Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom have published policies governing their day-to-day development or use of algorithmic systems. And considering how quickly technology in these areas evolves, it is disconcerting that only a quarter of the ranked telcos perform human rights impact assessments on either.
Though MTN and América Móvil led improvements, Telefónica also contributed to the companies' overall progress, placing it at the top of all three of our categories (governance, freedom of expression, and privacy) for the first time.
Though MTN and América Móvil led improvements, Telefónica also contributed to the companies’ overall progress, making gains that placed it at the top of all three of our indicator categories for the first time. Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and U.S.-based AT&T all performed above average in the Telco Giants Scorecard. France-based Orange continued to trail its regional peers. This year, it became the only RDR-ranked telco based in Europe to be surpassed by companies headquartered in the Global South.
Ooredoo and the UAE’s e& (formerly Etisalat) languished at the bottom of our Scorecard owing to their almost complete lack of transparency. Fortunately, we saw slightly better performance from other Asian telcos, including India’s Bharti Airtel and Axiata.
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