Slowly but surely, the U.S. Courts of Appeal increasingly agree on how to interpret the definition of “automatic telephone dialing system” in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. On February 19, 2020, a unanimous Seventh Circuit panel refused to revise a putative class action in Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, Inc. after concluding that the dialing system used by AT&T did not qualify as an autodialer. Like the Eleventh Circuit in Glasser v. Hilton Grand Vacations Company, LLC and Third Circuit in Dominguez v. Yahoo, Inc., the Seventh Circuit held that an “autodialer” must use “a random or sequential number generator” to either store or produce numbers. Because the system used by AT&T simply pulled numbers from a database, the court found that the system was not an autodialer and the texts did not violate the TCPA.
Tag Archives: text messaging
Privacy and Cybersecurity September 2018 Events
Join us in September as we contribute key events that explore the future of privacy, text messaging privacy, and what you need to know about the One Stop Shop under the GDPR.
FTC Text Spam Enforcement on the Rise
On March 7, the FTC announced a major new initiative cracking down on text message spammers and drove home the point by commencing eight new lawsuits against alleged spammers. In eight complaints filed in four different federal courts across the country, the FTC has charged a total of twenty-nine defendants, alleging that they collectively sent […]
U.S. Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments in Texting Case
A brief summary of the April 19, 2010 oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of City of Ontario v. Quon, a Fourth Amendment privacy case on appeal from the Ninth Circuit.
Supreme Court to Decide Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in Text Messages on Employer-Provided Devices
On December 14, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in City of Ontario v. Quon, a case that could set the parameters for the rights of employees in the workplace to privacy in their electronic communications, or just as easily be narrowly resolved on constitutional grounds with little implications for private employers. Quon, an officer with the […]