The ruling comes six years after a man from Montana sued Facebook to stop the company from texting with his cell phone, saying an unauthorized person had access to his Facebook account, according to the court report. Noah Duguid did not have a Facebook account and has never given the company his cell phone number, but in a way it was according to the complaint in the company’s database.
He continued to receive texts of the social media company, even after following the instructions on how to stop the messages, he claimed. Duguid told CNN Business the texts only stopped after he filed his case.
The case depends on the interpretation of the Telephone Protection Act, a 1991 law that protects U.S. cell phone users from unwanted robo-calls.
His lawyers argued that Facebook’s automatic messages violated the rule of law against automatic calls and texts to cell phones. To qualify as an “automatic telephone dialing system”, the law stipulates that a device must have the storage or produce a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator.
But evidence in the Duguid case showed that Facebook did not use an autodialer in its messages to him – that the technology is now somewhat outdated – and the court ruling, written by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, found that Facebook did not has not violated the law.
“Duguid’s quarrel is with Congress, which did not describe an autodialer as finely as he would have liked,” she wrote in the opinion. “This court must interpret what Congress has written, namely that ‘the use of a random or consecutive number generator’ changes both ‘store’ and ‘products’.
In an email, a Facebook spokesman wrote: ‘As the court acknowledged, the provisions of the law were never intended to prohibit companies from sending targeted safety notices, and the court’s ruling will enable companies to continue to keep their users ‘accounts secure.’
The National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group for low-income consumers, says it expects robocall businesses to upgrade their automated systems to Facebook’s.