Supreme Court sides with Facebook in text message dispute
by The Associated Press
Last Updated Apr 1, 2021 at 12:28 pm EDT
FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2020, file photo the Supreme Court is seen at sundown in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Facebook in a lawsuit over unwanted text notifications it sent, rejecting a claim that the messages violated the federal ban on robocalls.
The high court’s ruling for the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant was unanimous.
The case was brought by a man who received text messages from Facebook notifying him that an attempt had been made to log in to his account from a new device or browser. The man, Noah Duguid, said he never had a Facebook account and never gave Facebook his phone number. When he was unable to stop the notifications, he filed a class action lawsuit.
On March 30, 2021, the United States Supreme Court heard oral argument in
Transunion LLC v. Ramirez, No. 20-297, a case that could have far-reaching implications on absent class member standing, particularly where the injuries of these absent class members would be impossible or difficult to establish. The Court agreed to address whether Article III or Rule 23 permits a damages class action where the vast majority of the class suffered no actual injury, let alone an injury like what the class representative suffered.
The Court’s analysis will no doubt build on the precedent established in
Spokeo v. Robins, which held that allegations of mere procedural violations were insufficient on their own to satisfy the Article III standing requirement and, instead, plaintiffs had to allege concrete injuries they suffered from those procedural violations. As the Court noted in
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Facebook on Thursday in a dispute over the reach of a law that restricts calls to cellphones made with an “automatic telephone dialing system.”
Supreme Court sides with Facebook in case of unwanted text messages foxbusiness.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from foxbusiness.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
Few decisions in the world of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) have been more awaited than
Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. (2021). There, the Supreme Court of the United States (“SCOTUS”) wrestled with the ultimate TCPA question: “whether [an automatic telephone dialing system] encompasses equipment that can ‘store’ and dial telephone numbers, even if the device does not ‘us[e] a random or sequential number generator.’” Slip Op. at 1. In the end, SCOTUS had little difficulty finding “[i]t does not.”
Id. And the holding can be stated with simple clarity that businesses have sought for years: