2025 Transparency and Responsible Use Report

Foreword

This report accounts for the decisions we made in 2025 about whom we work with, the reviews we opened when we learned of possible misuse, the legal demands we received for customer data, and how mission partners used the retention controls in our products. It is longer than last year’s because we have more to account for.

Celia Rourke
Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer

Customer review

Our customer review committee considered 412 prospective customers in 2025 and declined 9. Of those declined, five were commercial organizations whose intended use we could not reconcile with our Acceptable Use Policy, three were agencies that could not show the oversight we require, and one was a government agency in a country to which we decided not to sell.

Misuse reviews

We opened 27 reviews of possible misuse in 2025 and closed 24. Reviews were opened on reports from mission partners’ own auditors (14), from Tellwright staff (7), from members of the public (4) and from press inquiries (2). Following review we suspended access for three users at two mission partners. We do not identify the mission partners concerned.

Legal demands for customer data

We received 63 legal demands for customer data: 41 subpoenas, 14 court orders, 6 public records requests and 2 requests from foreign governments. We referred 61 to the mission partner that owns the data. Two demands related to data Tellwright holds as a controller in its own right, concerning its own business records; we responded to those.

Lawful Access Program

The Responsible Use Council reviewed 5 applications to the Lawful Access Program in 2025 and approved 3. We do not disclose participating agencies or governments, or the number of collections conducted.

Retention

Of Kerbside camera owners active at the end of 2025, 88 percent kept the default retention period of 30 days, 7 percent set a shorter period and 5 percent a longer one. Reads matching hotlists and reads attached to investigations are retained under the policies of the agencies that hold them and are not included in these figures. Aggregated and de-identified data is not subject to customer retention settings.

Six years of reports