Marketplace
TeliaSonera is a reliable partner to all interest groups. The justification for TeliaSonera's existence comes from satisfied customers. We recognize the needs of different customer groups and their abilities to use our services. Our aim is to constantly improve co-operation with customers.
TeliaSonera follows in its marketing communication generally approved good trade practices, rules and regulations. Marketing communication does not use violence nor is the advertising portrayed in a media or program environment that is purely based on violence. TeliaSonera does not directly target children with its advertising.
Business Ethics
Business ethics is of utmost importance. However, sometimes it is very difficult to define what this means. That is why Our Shared Values are clearly defined to guide employees at TeliaSonera in different business situations with our customers.
Business ethics can refer to which businesses we want to become involved in or how we deal with services, applications and content in our networks.
Business ethics within telecommunications deals with issues which demand continuous attention such as:
- e-commerce and our responsibility for actors involved
- Internet and our responsibility to control it
- Subscribers' possibilities to affect the service configuration
- SPAM, Cookies
- Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
- Integrity vs. freedom of speech
- Customer satisfaction: product safety and quality, tariffs, billing, complaints, marketing, sales, help desk
TeliaSonera respects the protection of privacy and the prevention of abusive or illegal use of information and telecommunications services for reasons of racism, violence and all forms of child abuse.
Investors
There are many investors with different socially responsible investment (SRI) criteria. Pornography, tobacco, alcohol and weapons are often sectors in which many ethical funds do not invest.
Meanwhile, there are funds which have positive SRI criteria. They invest in companies which perform well on sustainable development criteria. They use different sustainability indexes as their investment criteria. The main criteria are human rights, working conditions and environmental issues.
The trend towards institutional investors (e.g. pension funds) having ethical criteria in their investment policies is growing. The investors monitor that "their" companies follow the ethical criteria. This is known as active ownership. Most of the investors get their information from public sources and reports, but the most active investors want to have a dialogue with the company.
Companies are owned by other companies and control of CSR issues has become very difficult. Control is easiest in wholly owned companies but gets more and more difficult when ownership decreases. Some ethical investors may set requirements on companies even if the company only owns 20 % of the company behaving irresponsibly. Officially, the only way to influence decision making in the company is through the Board of Directors' meetings and Annual General Meetings.
At the end of 2003, TeliaSonera had 869,967 shareholders, of which about 850,000 were individual investors. The Swedish and Finnish states owned a total of 64,4 % of the shares, individuals in Sweden and Finland 6.0 % and institutions and companies 29.6 %. How much attention do our investors pay to ethical and environmental issues when investing on TeliaSonera shares?
In August 2003 TeliaSonera reviewed the ownership policies of its shareholders and which type of ethical, social or environmental criteria the shareholders had (pdf). We found that at least 70 % (states, institutional investors) have set requirements for their ownership, but we are quite sure that the figure is much bigger because we could not go through all those thousands of institutions and companies that have smaller numbers of shares. It would be also interesting to know the ethical criteria of individual investors. In short TeliaSonera is deeply committed to complying with shareholders' ethical and environmental concerns.
Abuse of Internet
It is always best is to be proactive. TeliaSonera has already defined its SPAM policy (pdf). Spam is a global concern and an ever-growing problem. It clogs individual mailboxes as well as corporate networks and is sometimes a vehicle for viruses that can cause serious damage. TeliaSonera immediately blocks accounts, which are used to violate our anti-spam policies.
TeliaSonera also wants to raise awareness of different unwelcome phenomena on internet and how to protect against them. One targeted group is children. TeliaSonera has been an active participant in the EU project SAFT (Safety Awareness, Facts and Tools), which has developed a manual called "Follow your children to the internet". The manual encourages parents to have a dialogue with their children about what the internet is all about and why, for example, it is important to be careful about giving personal information to somebody on the internet.
For many years, TeliaSonera has been working with the organization Save the children Sweden to prevent distribution of child pornography, 90 % of which is assumed to come from the internet.
Accessibility for the Disabled
In EU there are tens of millions of people with disabilities. 2003 was the European Year of the Disabled to highlight barriers and discrimination faced by this significant segment of the population.
Legislation recommends taking into account disabilities but very often there is no obligation to offer special telecommunications services to users with disabilities.
The disabled is a very wide group of people and can be defined in many ways. They may have learning difficulties or different sensory disabilities like deafness, hearing impairment, blindness, visual impairment or different combinations of impairments. And they can have physical disabilities.
There is no exact figure for the number of disabled people, but according to an EU study, there are many sources which say that 10-15 % of people have disabilities and prevalence increases with age. Furthermore there are many people who experience functional difficulties with ICT systems. One study has estimated that 35-48 % of the population would benefit from better ICT design.
The major problems with ICT accessibility are dealing with human / ICT interfaces, expensive assistive technology and inaccessible information because of its poor design.
TeliaSonera has been developing services for people with disabilities and for elderly people in co-operation with organisations that represent them.
Here we present some currently available solutions, solutions which we hope to present in the near future and some services which unfortunately are no longer in use because there were so few users. The availability may vary from country to country.
Services for Users with Disabilities.
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