(RepublicanInformer.com)- Sick of robocalls? Well, the Supreme Court could be about to make your life worse.
Americans could soon be subject to significantly more robocalls as the Supreme Court rules that social media giant Facebook can’t be sued for texting customers with security alerts as the texts don’t technically come from an autodialer.
It follows six years of litigation from a Montana man who sued the social media giant to get their platform to step texting his cell phone to tell him that an unauthorized user was accessing his account. The man, Noah Duguid, didn’t have a Facebook account and had never provided his phone number to the platform – yet, his phone was continuously messaged with warnings about somebody’s account.
That’s annoying.
Duguid told the press that he only stopped receiving the messages after he filed the lawsuit.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was based on an interpretation of a 1991 piece of legislation known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The law is designed to stop cell phone users from being bombarded with text messages and phone calls from autodialers.
Duguid’s attorneys said that the automated messages sent to his cellphone violated the rule established in the law, however, the act said that an automatic telephone dialing system must have the ability to create telephone numbers based on random number generators – whereas Facebook only uses phone numbers provided by users.
It means that it’s likely a user first provided Duguid’s phone number accidentally or fraudulently.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the opinion describing how “Duguid’s quarrel is with Congress.”
“This Court must interpret what Congress wrote, which is that ‘suing a random or sequential number generator’ modifies both ‘store’ and ‘produce,’” she wrote.
A spokesperson from Facebook said that the “law’s provisions were never intended to prohibit companies from sending targeted security notifications and the court’s decision will allow companies to continue working to keep the accounts of their users safe.”
However, the ruling could have unintended consequences.
Now, Facebook has been given the green light by the Supreme Court to continue its operations, texting people as long as they have provided their phone number manually – or, somebody else has provided the number manually.
How does receiving Facebook robocalls promoting the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign sound to you?
