I've created a filter to send them to trash, but it just feels so very sad.
It was ebay, not paypal. Think I was paying ebay through paypal at the time.
Or are you saying you couldn't access it because it doesn't exist
I think he's saying he didn't even have access to the DB of non-plaintext passwords.
You do now :-)
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'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.
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!
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.
But there’s still no way to know if that number later gets released to another person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's work being done to address that:
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.
The other two are fine casualties for a world with far less autodialing. Call centers probably ought not exist.
In other words, it is not obvious at all. It just unfortunate turn of events for average prole.
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?
>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.
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?
> 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.