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The Overseen

Investigating surveillance, data and automated systems, and the people on the other end of them.

Partner content from Tellwright. This post was paid for by Tellwright and was not written or edited by The Overseen’s journalists.

Partner content from Tellwright

Transparency is something you do every day, not once a year

What goes into a responsible use report, and what we learned writing our sixth.

Celia Rourke, Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer, Tellwright Systems

1 min read

Last week Tellwright published its 2025 Transparency and Responsible Use Report, the sixth since we adopted our Responsible Use Framework in 2020. It is longer than last year’s. That is deliberate.

A transparency report is easy to write badly. It can count the things that are easy to count and leave out the things that matter. We try to do the opposite. Our report sets out how many prospective customers our review committee considered and how many it declined, how many reviews of possible misuse we opened and closed, and how many times we suspended a user’s access.

In 2025 our committee considered 412 prospective customers and declined nine. We opened 27 reviews of possible misuse and suspended access for three users at two mission partners. We received 63 legal demands for customer data and referred 61 of them to the customer that owns the data, as our agreements require.

Those numbers are not the whole story. Most of the work of responsible use happens before anything goes wrong: in the questions we ask a prospective customer about its legal authority and its oversight, in the training we give the people who use our products, and in the audit logs that let an agency, and the public it answers to, see how a tool was used.

We publish the report because the communities our partners serve deserve to know how these decisions are made. We would rather account for more than we have to than less.