How did this even get to the Supreme Court? This was a 9-0 decision because it was such a clear cut case.
> Noah Duguid sued Facebook under the act because he received several text messages from the company, alerting him that someone had attempted to access his Facebook account from an unknown browser — even though Duguid never had a Facebook account or gave the company his number. Those messages were sent to him using a form of automated technology, but one that did not use a random or sequential number generator.
It's obvious that companies should be allowed to contact you for a good reason if your number was entered into the system by someone else. Whether it was done by a robot or a human doesn't matter. The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.
Reminds me of a kafkaesque situation I had a few years back. I was getting text messages from Barclays about my account (I don’t have an account). I contacted them telling them to desist but because I’m not a customer I can’t actually tell them to change details on an account that isn’t mine.
> The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.
Without reading further into the details of this case than what's given in TFA, I would go so far as to say that there probably wasn't an "offender" in any strict sense. Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert. That's what happened to me when I first got the number that I have now -- it had, from what I could piece together, belonged to a young woman from a couple towns over who had apparently up and moved halfway across the country and gotten a new number without bothering to tell anybody at all. It was an annoyance to be sure but never once did I think of blaming the callers/texters.
I agree entirely; this is a dumb case. If decided for Duguid, here's a list of things that would probably have become illegal for businesses to do under TCPA:
1) using caller ID to return a missed call unless you were sure you were calling an existing customer
2) sending a one-time password over SMS, unless you had already validated that the telephone number belonged to your customer
3) using call-center software that automatically connects an operator to the customer's on-file telephone number in order to validate that the number was correct!
It came to them from a weird Ninth Circuit ruling. The Ninth Circuit is pretty much the poster child for weird ruling and judicial overreach. I wish there was more repercussions for it's behavior maybe for some of these cases where it is such a clear 9-0 kind of case the Supreme Court should look into if the lower justices are fulfilling there duty.
I know it may be something of an unpopular opinion, but maybe collecting vast amounts of information is not such a great idea after all. In a similar manner, I have certain level of beef with bank managing to bamboozle the public that bank's failing to establish, who they are dealing with is identity theft and not their negligence. It took years, but notice how people no longer even question this perspective. Hell, there is ID theft insurance now too.
In other words, it is not obvious at all. It just unfortunate turn of events for average prole.
I might not understand the terminology or process here, but doesn’t SCOTUS often refuse to hear cases that aren’t worth their time? Last year they chose not to hear a number of second amendment cases where it seemed like there was much more on the line and they would have overturned lower court rulings, so I’m surprised they chose to spend time on this one, which seems uncontroversial given the 9-0 vote.
I disagree, facebook is terrible at this stuff - someone used my email account to create a facebook account, no verification of the address was done, but I started receiving daily annoying emails from fb, fb is impossible to contact, there's no contact email on their web page, no phone numbers, nothing, I didn't have a fb account so I couldn't contact the person using my email address ... complete bunch of morons as far as running a web service
Perhaps. But when a phone # gets entered then FB should authenticate it on the spot. Then someone else can't use your number nefariously.
As it is, couldn't this be FB more or less phishing? That is, baiting non-users to register? Certainly, such tactics have been used with email. Why not SMS?
The practical consequences sorta suck, but the concept of a narrow reading of the law, leaning on the legislature to actually, you know, legislate — we could use more of that.
I'd have more sympathy for that if the legislature hadn't been designed to not legislate.
Passing legislation requires the approval of three bodies: the Senate, the House, and the President. That's before you add in the filibuster in the Senate, which sets a very high bar on its approval. For the Supreme Court to add a fourth check-and-balance means that legislation is practically impossible.
There is an enormous pressure to not do anything. That feature is well-intended, to ensure the legislation is passed with due deliberation and protect minority interests. But it means that any sizeable minority can throw a wrench into it. Legislation simply does not get passed.
It would almost certainly be possible to construct a rewrite of the robocall rules that would be broadly agreed on and suit the Supreme Court's concerns. But it will also be in somebody's interest to see that not happen, and they'll have allies who want to leverage that interest: "I'll vote to suppress this law if you'll vote for my thing."
I'm not calling on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench, but rather to point out that the widely-praised system of checks and balances is far from perfect. It gets in its own way a lot, and it's very easy for everybody to point fingers at everybody else and claim it's their fault. It practically begs people to do that.
Increased partisanship has certainly made that worse. And I'm not so much interested in pointing fingers here, either, but rather to note that it's the system of checks and balances that encourages that partisanship. It sets such a high bar on passing laws that only dedicated allies are capable of passing anything -- and to ensure that dedicated allies can stop anything. With a huge thumb on the scale towards the latter, so that no amount of "surely we can all agree to be agreeable..." can compensate.
> Of most import, it means that the act does not ban the use of now-dominant predictive dialing technology that can call or text targeted customers
This seems incorrect. "Predictive dialing" sounds like it should meet the definition of a sequential dialer.
This ruling seems a little odd but also I understand why the court ruled the way it did, even if the grounds seem like an excessively tortured reading of the statute. (Like, there was probably an easier way to get this ruling.)
Predictive dialing refers to a system capable of placing calls that are likely to be answered by the called party at a time when the calling party is available. Under this ruling, such a system may or may not be an ATDS; the predictive capability is irrelevant.
The key distinction is not whether the system can dial numbers from a list randomly or sequentially, but whether it can generate numbers randomly or sequentially (as opposed to being provided by another party).
Based on my reading of the decision, this doesn't change anything to do with robocalls, as I understand the term: i.e. an unsolicited, automated call where you hear a recording when you pick up.
Those would still be illegal under TCPA, because either the use of "an artificial or prerecorded voice" or "automated dialing system" establishes the illegal action.
This case only deals with the definition of "automated dialing system".
Sounds like a straightforward case of congress not realizing how software would change the nature of robocalls 30 years after the law was passed. Looks like Congress will have to amend the law and this decision should not be seen as some sort of constitutional right to spam people.
> To the extent that interpretive canons accurately describe how the English language is generally used, they are useful tools. … [But w]hen this Court describes canons as rules or quotes canons while omitting their caveats and limitations, we only encourage the lower courts to relegate statutory interpretation to a series of if-then computations. No reasonable reader interprets texts that way. [Alito in concurrence]
Why would it be horrible if there were a well-defined grammar for legal texts?
1. What would a device having "the capacity to store a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator" look like? That seems self-contradictory.
2. Does this now mean any company can open up a phone book (or even more exhaustive source) and automatically dial every number and get away scot-free?
I can understand the ruling, but it sounds like it also means it's now pretty trivial to bypass restrictions by getting a massive list of numbers to dial from a third party.
Consider the difference between the way the law and the platform treats transmission of spam calls over the telephone and pirated content over YouTube. You can tell which one is the concern of moneyed interests.
[+] [-] sxp|5 years ago|reply
> Noah Duguid sued Facebook under the act because he received several text messages from the company, alerting him that someone had attempted to access his Facebook account from an unknown browser — even though Duguid never had a Facebook account or gave the company his number. Those messages were sent to him using a form of automated technology, but one that did not use a random or sequential number generator.
It's obvious that companies should be allowed to contact you for a good reason if your number was entered into the system by someone else. Whether it was done by a robot or a human doesn't matter. The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelazaroff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flyingfences|5 years ago|reply
Without reading further into the details of this case than what's given in TFA, I would go so far as to say that there probably wasn't an "offender" in any strict sense. Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert. That's what happened to me when I first got the number that I have now -- it had, from what I could piece together, belonged to a young woman from a couple towns over who had apparently up and moved halfway across the country and gotten a new number without bothering to tell anybody at all. It was an annoyance to be sure but never once did I think of blaming the callers/texters.
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|5 years ago|reply
1) using caller ID to return a missed call unless you were sure you were calling an existing customer
2) sending a one-time password over SMS, unless you had already validated that the telephone number belonged to your customer
3) using call-center software that automatically connects an operator to the customer's on-file telephone number in order to validate that the number was correct!
[+] [-] tick_tock_tick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|5 years ago|reply
In other words, it is not obvious at all. It just unfortunate turn of events for average prole.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxpor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
As it is, couldn't this be FB more or less phishing? That is, baiting non-users to register? Certainly, such tactics have been used with email. Why not SMS?
[+] [-] sparker72678|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|5 years ago|reply
Passing legislation requires the approval of three bodies: the Senate, the House, and the President. That's before you add in the filibuster in the Senate, which sets a very high bar on its approval. For the Supreme Court to add a fourth check-and-balance means that legislation is practically impossible.
There is an enormous pressure to not do anything. That feature is well-intended, to ensure the legislation is passed with due deliberation and protect minority interests. But it means that any sizeable minority can throw a wrench into it. Legislation simply does not get passed.
It would almost certainly be possible to construct a rewrite of the robocall rules that would be broadly agreed on and suit the Supreme Court's concerns. But it will also be in somebody's interest to see that not happen, and they'll have allies who want to leverage that interest: "I'll vote to suppress this law if you'll vote for my thing."
I'm not calling on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench, but rather to point out that the widely-praised system of checks and balances is far from perfect. It gets in its own way a lot, and it's very easy for everybody to point fingers at everybody else and claim it's their fault. It practically begs people to do that.
Increased partisanship has certainly made that worse. And I'm not so much interested in pointing fingers here, either, but rather to note that it's the system of checks and balances that encourages that partisanship. It sets such a high bar on passing laws that only dedicated allies are capable of passing anything -- and to ensure that dedicated allies can stop anything. With a huge thumb on the scale towards the latter, so that no amount of "surely we can all agree to be agreeable..." can compensate.
[+] [-] lukeschlather|5 years ago|reply
This seems incorrect. "Predictive dialing" sounds like it should meet the definition of a sequential dialer.
This ruling seems a little odd but also I understand why the court ruled the way it did, even if the grounds seem like an excessively tortured reading of the statute. (Like, there was probably an easier way to get this ruling.)
[+] [-] nulbyte|5 years ago|reply
The key distinction is not whether the system can dial numbers from a list randomly or sequentially, but whether it can generate numbers randomly or sequentially (as opposed to being provided by another party).
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|5 years ago|reply
Those would still be illegal under TCPA, because either the use of "an artificial or prerecorded voice" or "automated dialing system" establishes the illegal action.
This case only deals with the definition of "automated dialing system".
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alwaysdoit|5 years ago|reply
Why would it be horrible if there were a well-defined grammar for legal texts?
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|5 years ago|reply
1. What would a device having "the capacity to store a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator" look like? That seems self-contradictory.
2. Does this now mean any company can open up a phone book (or even more exhaustive source) and automatically dial every number and get away scot-free?
[+] [-] Feneric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anothernewdude|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|5 years ago|reply