The Supreme Court on Thursday shut down a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social media company had violated federal laws about robocalls.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion that Facebook had not violated the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act when it sent texts to Noah Duguid, alerting him of a Facebook login when he did not have an account. Sotomayor wrote that since Facebook’s method of sending the messages did not fit into the parameters of the law, it could not be held accountable under the TCPA.
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“To qualify as an ‘automatic telephone dialing system’ under the TCPA, a device must have the capacity either to store a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator, or to produce a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator,” Sotomayor wrote, noting that Facebook did not employ this technology.
Duguid proposed a class action lawsuit in 2014 after he received repeated unwanted messages from Facebook. He alleged that the company had built a database of phone numbers that it would automatically contact whenever it detected a login to an account. But, Facebook countered, because the messages were not random, they were not in violation of robocall law, which prohibits massive bursts of spam texts sent to random numbers.
A federal district court sided with Facebook. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Duguid’s claims were valid because companies only had to “‘store numbers to be called’ and ‘to dial such numbers automatically.’”
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Sototmayor wrote that both Duguid and the 9th Circuit were wrong, and that if they want to see robocall law updated to restrict Facebook, they should take it up with Congress.
“Duguid’s quarrel is with Congress, which did not define an autodialer as malleably as he would have liked,” she wrote.
