Global Telecom Companies Struggle to Deliver on Human-Rights Commitments

A tech policy project’s latest grading of human-rights commitments finds 12 telecom companies from around the world to be a relatively dirty dozen, with the “best” company earning a score of 57%, the worst just 9%. 

This 2022 Telco Giants Scorecard(Opens in a new window) released Monday by Ranking Digital Rights(Opens in a new window) (RDR), an independent research program supported by the New America think tank in Washington, D.C., offers some lukewarm praise for recent telecom commitments to protect freedom of speech and privacy, but not enough to give any of these firms a passing grade.

Spain’s Telefónica(Opens in a new window) got that 57% rating for pledging to assess the human-rights effects of targeted advertising and “zero rating” certain sites or apps from its data caps. It lost points because of such retrograde moves as participating in an aggressive ad-industry user-tracking initiative and trying to stop Apple from rolling out its Private Relay service, RDR’s report says.

The one US carrier profiled, AT&T(Opens in a new window), came in third with a score of 40%, which RDR says reflects a stronger commitment to evaluating human rights and the company ending its zero-rating program to comply with a 2018 California net-neutrality law that survived a 2019 court challenge. RDR was much less impressed by AT&T’s inadequate documentation of how it collects and retains consumer information.

For example, the clearest disclosure of AT&T’s retention of location data collected from cell towers this year came not from any AT&T blog post or customer-support document but an inquiry from Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel. AT&T’s response confirmed that it still retains that cell-site location information for five years, much longer than the two-year period at T-Mobile or one year at Verizon.

RDR places a high priority overall on corporate policies and disclosures, the idea being that companies making these pledges can be judged by how they live up to these words. As a result, RDR gives Apple much less credit(Opens in a new window) than some other tech-policy groups because of Apple’s continued opacity over how its App Store rules work.

Qatar-based Ooredoo(Opens in a new window) brought up the rear with that 9% score. RDR points to multiple offenses that earned such a poor rating: A continued lack of transparency about its privacy practices, not documenting how it has complied with government-ordered internet shutdowns in four of the countries in which it operates, and selling its Myanmar subsidiary without taking sufficient care to protect the data of its now-former customers. 

RDR released a 2022 Big Tech Scorecard(Opens in a new window) in April that also didn’t give any of the 14 companies assessed a passing grade. Monday’s report, however, suggests that worldwide, telecoms remain a much bigger problem for human rights. 

“Though Big Tech companies have stolen the spotlight in recent discussions of the ills of our information systems, our findings show that, year after year, telcos perpetuate the same digital rights harms while facing far less scrutiny,” the report’s executive summary notes with a reminder to look outside the US. “This is especially true where telcos are government-owned, in part or whole, and where they operate in authoritarian or authoritarian-trending regimes.”