High court backs Facebook, limits robocall ban

The U.S. Supreme Court limited the reach of the decades-old federal ban on robocalls, siding with business groups and throwing out a lawsuit that accused Facebook Inc. of repeatedly sending unwanted text messages.

The unanimous decision, which overturned a lower court ruling, said a key provision in the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to calling systems that use a random or sequential number generator, an approach that Facebook told the court has become all but obsolete.

The ruling will give telemarketers, companies and political parties freer rein to use computer systems to call or text mobile phones without first getting consent.

The ruling doesn’t affect a separate provision of the anti-robocall law that protects residential phones from calls that use artificial or recorded voices. It also leaves intact the federal do-not-call registry that individuals can use to try to block telemarketing calls to home phones.

But the decision will have an especially big impact on small businesses that use mobile phones, leaving them vulnerable to unwanted calls and texts, said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center.

“Texts, including telemarketing texts, to cell phones used by small businesses will not have restrictions on them whatsoever,” Saunders said. She said consumer advocates would turn to Congress to strengthen the law.

The ruling is a defeat for Noah Duguid, the man who sued Facebook. Duguid said he received repeated texts in 2014 notifying him of an attempted log-in, even though he didn’t have an account. Facebook said Duguid probably had a recycled phone number that had once been associated with an account. The lawsuit sought class action status.

Writing for the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Duguid was pressing such an expansive interpretation of the robocall law that it would have covered some calls and texts placed by modern mobile phones.

Duguid’s interpretation “would take a chainsaw to these nuanced problems when Congress meant to use a scalpel,” Sotomayor wrote.