Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Mobile Phone Providers (An Ethical Survey)

Recently I decided to change my UK mobile phone provider. My usage of my mobile is fairly minimal, but nevertheless I thought that it made sense to look for a provider who could demonstrate a degree of social and environmental responsibility. Therefore I set about trying to discover which mobile phone providers have any form of ethical policy, and if they do, what their policies actually are. The results have been instructive, so I thought it worthwhile giving an overview here.

I was surprised how difficult it was to come by information relating to the ethical stances taken by mobile phone service providers. Gooshing, the ethical shopping site has plenty of information about mobile phones, but as yet has no information concerning providers. Searching online did not come up with anything substantial. As a result, I decided to contact six major mobile phone providers myself. I wrote a brief email to all six companies as follows:

I am currently considering changing mobile phone providers for my Pay as You Go phone. As I am concerned about the wider effects of my actions as a consumer, I would like to use a company as my provider with the best possible ethical policies.

Therefore, I am getting in touch to ask if you could let me know whether you have any form of ethical policy for your mobile phone service provision, and if so, whether you could provide me with details.

All six providers that I contacted – 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone – responded within a few days; but only one took the trouble to actually answer the question, and demonstrated even the most cursory sense of what it might be to have an ethical policy..

Source : http://www.thinkbuddha.org/

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