SCOTUSblog by Amanda Shanor 12/7/2020
On Tuesday, in Facebook v. Duguid, the Supreme Court for the second time this year will hear oral argument on the federal law that bans robocalls and robotext messages to cellphones. The question before the court this time is whether calls and texts sent using certain automated messaging systems are covered by the robocall ban — including predictive technology that calls or texts targeted customers, based, for example, on the vast data now collected on American consumers.
Why does this matter? Because since the Telephone Consumer Protection Act was enacted in 1991, telemarketing has changed dramatically. While targeted automated calls and texts — and, for that matter, cellphones — were starting to materialize in the early 1990s, they are now pervasive. Does the robocall law forbid them without a consumer’s consent, or does it only ban robocalls and robotexts made by older technology that dials random or sequential numbers? The answer to that statutory question is likely to have huge implications for the future of both marketing and cellphone spam.
Enacted in 1991, the TCPA responded to widespread consumer “outrage[] over the proliferation of intrusive, nuisance calls to their homes from telemarketers.†Congress pointed to evidence that consumers consider automated calls to be “a nuisance and an invasion of privacy.†The TCPA’s lead Senate sponsor went so far as to describe automated and prerecorded calls as “the scourge of modern civilization,†“hound[ing] us until we want to rip the telephone right out of the wall.â€
The part of the statute at issue in Duguid bans “using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice†— both of which the Federal Communications Commission considers “robocalls†— to call or text cellphones, as well as emergency telephone lines, hospital patient rooms, pagers, and phones that charge for incoming calls, among others. The FCC, state attorneys general and private parties are authorized to sue those who don’t comply with the law; the penalty is up to $1,500 per call.
Noah Duguid sued Facebook, alleging that the company violated the TCPA by using an automatic telephone dialing system to send text messages to his cellphone without his consent. Duguid is not a Facebook user and had not given Facebook his number. Facebook mistakenly sent Duguid multiple text message as part of its policy of automatically sending a computer-generated text message to a user’s cellphone when their account is accessed from an unknown device. Duguid contacted Facebook to get the messages turned off, but he continued to receive them for several months.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/12/case-preview-justices-again-take-on-anti-robocall-law/
