The U.S. Supreme Court Limits TCPA Liability By Narrowly Interpreting ATDS
On April 1, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court in the class action case of Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, No. 19-511, resolved a circuit court split on the meaning of automatic telephone dialing system (“ATDS”) under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) by unanimously reversing the Ninth Circuit’s broad definition and narrowly interpreting ATDS. Bringing much needed clarity the Federal Communications Commission has not been able to provide to date, the Supreme Court held that to qualify as ATDS “a device must have the capacity to store a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator, or to produce a…