U.S Supreme Court bars suit against Facebook under anti-robocall law
On Thursday The U.S Supreme Court barred a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Facebook Inc of violating a federal anti-robocall law, sparing the social media company from a potentially costly fight over an unwanted text message.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor sided with Facebook in its appeal of a lower court ruling that revived the lawsuit alleging that the text message violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a 1991 law that sought to curb telemarketing abuse by banning most unauthorized robocalls.
The court ruled that Facebook’s actions – sending text messages without consent – did not fit within the technical definition of the type of conduct barred by the law, which was enacted before the rise of modern cellphone technology.
The Lawsuit was filed in 2015 in California federal court by Montana resident Noah Duguid, who said Facebook sent him many automatic text messages without his consent. The lawsuit accused Menlo Park, California based Facebook of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s restriction on using an automatic telephone dialling system.
A federal judge threw out the lawsuit but in 2019 the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived it. The appeals court took a broad view of the law, saying it not only bans devices that automatically dial randomly generated numbers but also stored number that is not randomly generated.
