Supreme Court says Facebook SMS alerts are not illegal robocalls

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the SMS alerts on Facebook did not violate laws against automatically dialed calls. The court ruled that a lower court defined illegal ‘robocalls’ too broadly and that the term should only apply to systems that generate lists of numbers and call them indiscriminately, not a system that simply stores numbers and calls them automatically.

The lawsuit involves text messages that notify Facebook users of an attempted connection. His plaintiff, Noah Duguid, filed a lawsuit after receiving unwanted and erroneous notifications while he did not have a Facebook account. Duguid argued that Facebook was in violation of the Consumer Telephone Protection Act 1991 (TCPA). An appeals court agreed, but the Supreme Court interpreted the definitions in the law differently.

By closely analyzing the grammar of the TCPA, the court concluded that an illegal automatic numbering system “must use a random or sequential number generator”, and this definition “excludes equipment such as Facebook’s login notification system. , which does not use such technology. “

Facebook argued that the earlier court ruling could have defined basic smartphone functions as illegal autodialers. The Supreme Court accepted. “Duguid’s interpretation of an automatic dialer would capture virtually any modern cell phone,” the opinion says. While robocalls are a huge problem on U.S. phone networks, he says “expanding the definition of an autodialer to include any equipment that simply stores and dials phone numbers would take a chainsaw to these nuanced issues. . So he opts for a much more limited definition – both for Facebook and for any similar future system.