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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

How did this even get to the Supreme Court? This was a 9-0 decision because it was such a clear cut case.

> Noah Duguid sued Facebook under the act because he received several text messages from the company, alerting him that someone had attempted to access his Facebook account from an unknown browser — even though Duguid never had a Facebook account or gave the company his number. Those messages were sent to him using a form of automated technology, but one that did not use a random or sequential number generator.

It's obvious that companies should be allowed to contact you for a good reason if your number was entered into the system by someone else. Whether it was done by a robot or a human doesn't matter. The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.

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Reminds me of a kafkaesque situation I had a few years back. I was getting text messages from Barclays about my account (I don’t have an account). I contacted them telling them to desist but because I’m not a customer I can’t actually tell them to change details on an account that isn’t mine.

I keep getting email from PayPal about their terms and conditions changing. I have a PayPal account, which I can't delete, because to delete it, I'd have to log in, but when I enter my details (which I know are correct; I use a password manager), I get a generic error message. Trying the password recovery procedure with my username gives me the same generic error message. I've emailed customer support twice, but they don't seem to be staffed by humans, because both times I got the same "you should use the password recovery procedure" template response, even though I explained it doesn't work.

I've created a filter to send them to trash, but it just feels so very sad.

Years ago (2008?) I was able to get PayPal's customer support to tell me my password over the phone. Try that ;)

No you didn't. PayPal has never stored passwords in plaintext. I know because I worked anti-fraud for PayPal, and even I couldn't get access to that database, much less see passwords, even though I had a list of passwords I was trying to verify that I had gotten from people who steal accounts.

wait. so you think a plain text db of customer passwords does exist?

Or are you saying you couldn't access it because it doesn't exist

If he has the passwords, he could hash them and compare that against the entries in the DB.

I think he's saying he didn't even have access to the DB of non-plaintext passwords.

It doesn't exist. They were so secure about their passwords they wouldn't even let me check my password list against the database as an insider checking for fraud.

Crap, you're right. Thanks for calling me out on that.

It was ebay, not paypal. Think I was paying ebay through paypal at the time.

If the volume is bothersome, send it to their privacy contact.

> I don’t have an account

You do now :-)

I have this situation right now with the bank in Singapore. The only way I can stop the email is to visit one of their branches. On the other side of the world.

I've had this problem with a few companies over the years. In gmail it was possible to add a rule to auto-trash all email from that company. I'm guessing other email software has a similar feature. Frustrating I couldn't get them to stop sending them but at least I no longer see the emails.

Block them?

I have the same issue with Microsoft Teams. Someone once invited me to join a group on Teams, and now (years later) I get occasional but persistent emails from Teams. I can't stop them, because the setting apparently needs me to be signed in, but I don't have an account. I mark them as spam, because it's all I can do.

I think I experienced the same quirk - basically, you need a Teams license to sign in to teams (in order to access an outside organization as a guest), so if you don’t pay for it via your AAD org (or via a free live.com account) you’ll get emails while not being able to accept the invite or access the channels.

I had a fun time this past year with someone using my email on Amazon. It took many calls and escalations over a few weeks before getting the problem fixed, largely because I wasn't the account owner. I have no idea why my email is allowed to be permanently attached to any account without verification.

Can't you do a password reset and take over the account if you control the email? That might be illegal, but you'd probably be OK as long as you don't charge their credit card. Or, you know, it's been awhile since you used Amazon and you actually did forget the password, right? wink wink

Thankfully no, I tried it and it requires additional account information. But I was also very honest when I called Amazon about the issue. Since I had shipping addresses, order history, and names of the other person I wonder if social engineering would have worked. Without their phone or credit card I think probably not.

FWIW, 9–0 verdicts are actually the most common: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...

> The offender here was whoever put Duguid's phone number into FB's database.

Without reading further into the details of this case than what's given in TFA, I would go so far as to say that there probably wasn't an "offender" in any strict sense. Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert. That's what happened to me when I first got the number that I have now -- it had, from what I could piece together, belonged to a young woman from a couple towns over who had apparently up and moved halfway across the country and gotten a new number without bothering to tell anybody at all. It was an annoyance to be sure but never once did I think of blaming the callers/texters.

I once had an internal number on a corporate system that, for some reason, was assigned to multiple desks at the same time. It took a while for us to figure out that anyone who called the number just called both of us simultaneously and only got to talk to whoever happened to answer first.

> Most likely what happened is that someone entered their own number in connection to their own account, then they got a new number and never bothered updating Facebook, then the number got recycled and assigned to Duguid so he got the alert.

I've had this happen to me and really wish phone companies would wait at least 90 days before putting a disconnected number back in service. The worst part of it is I was given the option to "disable" SMS. But it turns out that doesn't actually prevent shortcode messages from going through.

Forget recycled phone numbers, I get this same problem with email for a domain I bought around a year ago. Just the other day I had an email with an attached transcript for someone's recent Medrite visit. The domain I bought was at one point used for some corporate email, almost all of the emails I get for it are not business related though, it's basically all personal stuff. There needs to be a method to declare "This identifier has changed hands" for phone numbers, domains, IP addresses, street addresses, etc.

I agree entirely; this is a dumb case. If decided for Duguid, here's a list of things that would probably have become illegal for businesses to do under TCPA:

1) using caller ID to return a missed call unless you were sure you were calling an existing customer

2) sending a one-time password over SMS, unless you had already validated that the telephone number belonged to your customer

3) using call-center software that automatically connects an operator to the customer's on-file telephone number in order to validate that the number was correct!

2) and 3) would probably always be illegal since phone numbers are recycled and you can never know when that happens. I guess it’s fairly likely that is what happened in this case?

So even if you are sure it is the number of a customer, it is verified and used for correspondence it can still be sometime else number a year (I don’t know how long the recycling waiting time is) later.

> you can never know when that happens

There's work being done to address that:

https://www.fcc.gov/reassigned-numbers-database

https://www.reassigned.us/

Regarding the first two, it's not just a matter of an existing relationship, but also consent. As to the latter, this was the effect, and likely will continue to be, until companies decide to implement changes in response to this ruling. Especially larger corporations have been capturing consent and even relying on third-parties to manually dial numbers, because this was the prevailing interpretation until the Supreme Court reintroduced common sense.

I don't see the relevance of consent: you can't consent on behalf of a third party.

The evidentiary question of whether a customer had actually consented to receive calls/texts from a service to which they had subscribed is separate from the question of liability for using automation to call/text a number that turns out not to belong to a customer.

Two factor auth is so bad over SMS for security that id love to see it banned (even for the wrong reasons).

The other two are fine casualties for a world with far less autodialing. Call centers probably ought not exist.

> 2) sending a one-time password over SMS, unless you had already validated that the telephone number belonged to your customer

Note that it's pretty hard to validate a phone number belongs to someone. You could ask their telephone company, but their telephone company shouldn't disclose subscriber information, and even if they did, maybe you get a name, but lots of people have the same name as me, so what does that show?

Commonly, people send a text message with a code or a phone call with a code to demonstrate control (not belonging), but that's almost always automated, and you would need the number to be validated before you could validate it.

Rather than texting the consumer a security code and having them enter it in the browser, you could display a security code in the browser and have them text it to your automated system.

But there’s still no way to know if that number later gets released to another person.

AFAIU, caller ID can be faked. Getting an SMS from a phone number does not demonstrate anything. Probably this is why the send factor is received, not sent.

As the sibling comment says, spoofing sender ID or caller ID is relatively easy. You can't trust it, outside of some very narrow cases (although, shaken/stir may change that).

Some carriers do make available lists of recycled numbers, and some telephone information companies aggregate these lists, when I was looking, coverage was sparse though, and questions about reliability and privacy were too big relative to the limited coverage. Sharing of confidential information was an issue too: carriers wanted to provide events only for numbers of interest to a 3rd party service, so the carrier didn't divulge the number of customers leaving their service; the 3rd party service didn't want to provide numbers of interest because it would divulge user count. I may be biased (I was working for a service), but the recycled number list feels less privacy invasive than providing numbers of intetest. The numbering space is small, so you can't meaningfully obscure the numbers, etc. Determining which carrier is responsible for a number is also tricky, of course.

If they prompoted to receive a code during sign-up it would make the system immune to a person accidentally entering the wrong number. Only malicious entry would remain, which I suspect the company would ultimately not be liable for. So I believe it would actually be a better solution if the goal is to prevent robotexting people who didn't consent to it.

So I think you're proposing, enter your number, get a code, send a text to a special number with that code, get a text reply and enter that. Then the service has done their best job of validating the number before they validated it.

Of course, getting a working incoming number for all countries worldwide that doesn't cost users an arm and a leg to message is not exactly easy.

These were already violations of the TCPA in the 9th Circuit under the 9th Circuit's previous ruling in Marks where the court found that an autodialer is any equipment that dials a number from a stored list.

Marks was used as precedent for this lawsuit. Facebook argued that this case was different from Marks. The Ninth Circuit found otherwise. SCOTUS appears to have shot down the ruling from Marks.

Marks was widely regarded as a terrible decision because it made no sense at the time. It's nice to see SCOTUS return some common sense to the law.

Note also that the TCPA allows for statutory damages of up to $1500 per violation, so it takes less than 675 calls/texts to rack up $1M in liability. Class action attorneys love it because they don't have to show damages. They only have to show that the call or text was sent using an autodialer.

Having now read Marks it now makes a whole lot more sense why this is in the Supreme Court; the Ninth Circuit seems to have gone off the deep end with that decision.

>Marks was widely regarded as a terrible decision because it made no sense at the time.

Citation? I've looked over _Marks_, and it doesn't seem unreasonable, and the 9th circuit was not the only court to adopt the same interpretation of the statute. I can see why certain industries would lothe that rule, but it doesn't seem to me that the Court's opinion is a fine, if not exemplary, example of legal interpretation. Similarly, it's far from clear that Congress intended that such behavior be permissible when they passed the law.

Honestly, _Marks_ makes more sense to me than the Supreme Court's interpretation does. Reading a law's text in the narrow and formal way that they did causes the law to be nonsensical.

It came to them from a weird Ninth Circuit ruling. The Ninth Circuit is pretty much the poster child for weird ruling and judicial overreach. I wish there was more repercussions for it's behavior maybe for some of these cases where it is such a clear 9-0 kind of case the Supreme Court should look into if the lower justices are fulfilling there duty.

Does the fact that he tried to get them to stop harassing him and they refused make the case any less clear cut?

I know it may be something of an unpopular opinion, but maybe collecting vast amounts of information is not such a great idea after all. In a similar manner, I have certain level of beef with bank managing to bamboozle the public that bank's failing to establish, who they are dealing with is identity theft and not their negligence. It took years, but notice how people no longer even question this perspective. Hell, there is ID theft insurance now too.

In other words, it is not obvious at all. It just unfortunate turn of events for average prole.

I don't think you'll find that "collecting vast amounts of information is not such a great idea after all" is an unpopular opinion on HN.

That said, it seems quite reasonable that companies collect ways to contact you, including email and phone number (at least until there are ways to easily make these unique per business so they can't be used to track you).

I'm just confused about how his phone number got associated with another account. Doesn't FB include a verification step for setting a phone number?

I might not understand the terminology or process here, but doesn’t SCOTUS often refuse to hear cases that aren’t worth their time? Last year they chose not to hear a number of second amendment cases where it seemed like there was much more on the line and they would have overturned lower court rulings, so I’m surprised they chose to spend time on this one, which seems uncontroversial given the 9-0 vote.

I disagree, facebook is terrible at this stuff - someone used my email account to create a facebook account, no verification of the address was done, but I started receiving daily annoying emails from fb, fb is impossible to contact, there's no contact email on their web page, no phone numbers, nothing, I didn't have a fb account so I couldn't contact the person using my email address ... complete bunch of morons as far as running a web service

Were they resolving a circuit split? That's usually the way "silly" cases get up there.

That does seem to be the case here.

>the Third, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal require number generation in order for technology to qualify as an ATDS. [...] The Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, in contrast, have liberally construed the statutory text and do not require number generation.

https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2301/2020-0...

This was an appeal from the 9th Circuit, so provided an opportunity for the Supreme Court to overturn the lower Court's ruling.

Perhaps. But when a phone # gets entered then FB should authenticate it on the spot. Then someone else can't use your number nefariously.

As it is, couldn't this be FB more or less phishing? That is, baiting non-users to register? Certainly, such tactics have been used with email. Why not SMS?

In another article, I believe it said that the phone number was recycled from an actual user.

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