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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The effect of declining a case is to leave the lower court's decision in place. However, the lower court sided with Duguid, not Facebook. Here, the Supreme Court overturned that decision.
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
>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.
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?
The practical consequences sorta suck, but the concept of a narrow reading of the law, leaning on the legislature to actually, you know, legislate — we could use more of that.
I'd have more sympathy for that if the legislature hadn't been designed to not legislate.
Passing legislation requires the approval of three bodies: the Senate, the House, and the President. That's before you add in the filibuster in the Senate, which sets a very high bar on its approval. For the Supreme Court to add a fourth check-and-balance means that legislation is practically impossible.
There is an enormous pressure to not do anything. That feature is well-intended, to ensure the legislation is passed with due deliberation and protect minority interests. But it means that any sizeable minority can throw a wrench into it. Legislation simply does not get passed.
It would almost certainly be possible to construct a rewrite of the robocall rules that would be broadly agreed on and suit the Supreme Court's concerns. But it will also be in somebody's interest to see that not happen, and they'll have allies who want to leverage that interest: "I'll vote to suppress this law if you'll vote for my thing."
I'm not calling on the Supreme Court to legislate from the bench, but rather to point out that the widely-praised system of checks and balances is far from perfect. It gets in its own way a lot, and it's very easy for everybody to point fingers at everybody else and claim it's their fault. It practically begs people to do that.
Increased partisanship has certainly made that worse. And I'm not so much interested in pointing fingers here, either, but rather to note that it's the system of checks and balances that encourages that partisanship. It sets such a high bar on passing laws that only dedicated allies are capable of passing anything -- and to ensure that dedicated allies can stop anything. With a huge thumb on the scale towards the latter, so that no amount of "surely we can all agree to be agreeable..." can compensate.
To add some color, federal legislation affecting fifty states equally is hard to pass without broad consensus. I agree that was designed in as a feature, not a bug. It means when the nation doesn’t feel in the mood to compromise, the status quo holds more weight. The federal legislature has certainly had no issue passing laws in its time and certainly will continue to do. I think we’re still wrestling with the impacts of social media on politics though, trying to incorporate that dynamic for good or ill.
Unfortunately, the nation hasn't been in a mood to compromise since before social media. When was the last time that a President wasn't actively hated by the opposition? Not merely disliked or opposed, but actively considered incompetent and detrimental to the nation? The last time people talked about a "honeymoon period"?
The last one I can remember is George HW Bush -- unless you want to count the brief honeymoon his son was given in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Not that people liked George HW Bush (he didn't win reelection), but he was opposed rather than actively harassed. Arguably Bill Clinton got such a "honeymoon" period, but after that he was opposed with a literal vengeance.
Presidents are a very particular lens to look at this with, but I think it's illuminating. I believe it reflects the nation not being interested in compromise. (There are other interpretations, but I think it's indicative.)
If there was a time that the federal legislature had no issue passing laws, it's at least 30 years ago. That's before a lot of HN users were even born. And it shows no time of abating any time soon. Indeed, it only seems to be growing.
Yeah, never in my lifetime. I remember a college prof in the late nineties telling me she though Reagan was the worst president in the country’s history. I remember thinking at the time, “jeez, that’s a bit much for a variety of reasons”. At the time though there was as much vitriol against Clinton.
I guess a difference may have been that legislators weren’t as accountable in the same way as they are today, and had more room to negotiate and engage in generalized reciprocity.
Today, politics has a very distasteful air of religious zealotry, where “sinning” against the orthodoxy of the true believers on both sides is shamed, purity idolized. So everyone is fighting tooth and nail for the barest majorities and procedural tricks to let them manifest their will with nothing more than that.
On one hand I find the accountability good, but on the other I wish as a nation we cared less about “national conversations” and thought/acted more locally. National solutions are rarely a well-suited or efficient fit, so in a way, the harder it is for party zealots of either side to enforce their will across fifty different states, the better, IMO. The threat that either side will be successful is what keeps everyone overly-anxious and hyper-engaged/enraged. In a way, having confidence in the inefficiency is good medicine.
I definitely wish people thought more locally -- really locally, like their towns. I don't think it's a coincidence that the time frame I outlined above is the same as the emergence of 24 hour news, which rapidly became 24 hour infotainment -- the news as a big Manichean football match. I believe that pushed people into thinking about Big Issues and lost any focus on things that actually matter in their daily lives.
If there was a "golden age" of national collegiality, it was the postwar era -- exactly the time we were busily building infrastructure that made interstate commerce and travel much easier. That ended when genuinely national and world issues came to the fore -- a push to end minority abuse in some states, and a war that forced young men to participate. I believe that the lines were set then and we continue to re-fight that same fight.
The issue in TFA is exactly the kind of thing that needs a national-level response: the only thing more distasteful than a national rule about robocalls is going to be 50 state rules about robocalls that would require federal court litigation anyway. Past interstates and airplanes, the Internet has replaced ordinary telecommunications, and blurred state lines almost to invisibility.
> On one hand I find the accountability good, but on the other I wish as a nation we cared less about “national conversations” and thought/acted more locally.
There are two main problems here, I think:
States and localities are usually not funded very well. With the exception of high-tax states like CA and NY, most states don't take in enough revenue to do anything of significant size, and residents are generally against tax hikes.
While the federal government was designed to be fairly limited, that's not remotely the case anymore, and even when states get money from the federal government, they're limited in what they can do with it. For example, several CA legislators would love to set up single-payer health insurance in CA, but federal Medicare dollars come with too many strings attached (and only the US Congress can grant CA the ability to use that money in different ways).
I feel like in many ways we have the worst of all worlds. The federal government doesn't want to invest in services for citizens, but the states and cities don't have enough money to do it themselves, and aren't allowed to do things with much of the money they get.
The real problem with this is federal preemption. What happens at the federal level isn't just that they don't do anything good, it's that they actively do something bad or ineffective, but in so doing wade into the swamp and throw out the ability of the states to do anything better because of preemption.
Which implies that the problem is still that it's too easy to do things at the federal level. Let them actually do nothing so the states can do something.
> "...but rather to note that it's the system of checks and balances that encourages that partisanship."
i'd argue 'encourage' too strongly leans into intent here, and that 'permit' seems closer to what's going on. any multi-party, adversarial system is prone to partisanship. 'checks and balances' may be more explicitly adversarial, but making that explicit isn't necessary for people to line up against each other in a political context and create gridlock. plus, 4 factions aren't really better than 2 at creating gridlock (because they often devolve into 2 opposing factions anyway).
I just have a slightly hard time believing the Supreme Court when it throws up its tidy hands and says, "Well, this is a problem for the legislature", knowing full well that the legislature won't.
Especially what it's done along partisan lines, though it isn't the case with this one. The Supreme Court is dominated by fans of the status quo, who then set the rules to further encourage the status quo.
It's very hard not to read it as "Everything is fine with me, and if it's not fine with you, go get the House and the Senate and the President to agree with you (snicker). Then come back and I'll have a look at it."
>> the widely-praised system of checks and balances is far from perfect
Close to perfect is a pretty high bar.
When a system of checks and balances lasts a quarter of a millennium, it got more right than it did wrong.
>> Legislation simply does not get passed
The Justice Department once tried to figure out how many federal crimes there were, they gave up and could only estimate. That was 35 years ago, they estimated something like 3000 crimes that were defined, it is estimated to be 4500 now. There are tens of thousands of pages of federal legislation. There are thousands of pages in the federal tax code alone.
This would effectively mean that veto power on everything would be held by any 13 states. For reference the 13 least populated states put together have 4% of the US population. So at minimum blocking all progress needs slightly more than half or just over 2% of the populations support.
What you are saying is that senators representing as little as 2% of the US population should be able to overrule the senators representing the other 98%.
For practical purposes since we know which side are complete obstructionist what you are saying is that Democrats should surrender control of the country regardless of how much of the vote they win. On the An unholy alliance of Oklahoma, Utah, Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, and Wyoming. Republicans controlling 51% of the vote in states representing 7.8% of the US population could block all progress forever until they got their way. That is to say they would retain a death grip on all progress with as little as half of that 7.8% of the population behind them.
This micro minority death grip on our nation would be so strong that the governors veto power hardly matters because anything that wasn't blocked by 1/4 of the senate would never find itself blocked after.
In practice the uneven representation that is a design goal of the senate makes it both too easy for flyover states to force their agenda and too hard for policies that are broadly popular to be blocked by the flyover states.
The Articles of Confederation were designed to give limited power to a weak federal government and more power to stronger state governments. It was a disaster, then we tried again - the other way - with the Constitution.
The Constitution puts limits on the power of government, the goal isn't a limited federal government.
> The Articles of Confederation were designed to give limited power to a weak federal government and more power to stronger state governments. It was a disaster, then we tried again - the other way - with the Constitution.
The country thrived under the Constitution with a narrow interpretation of the commerce clause and a federal government that spent 3% of GDP instead of 20% for more than a hundred years.
The expansive "reinterpretation" of federal power in the 20th century was the source of all the existing trouble.
I would posit that those outcomes had more to do with scientific progress than with whether social security or the ban on leaded gasoline are implemented at the federal level versus the states.
And a significant amount of that progress was funded by the government, relied on discoveries funded by government, or were made by people who lived or were educated because of government funding.
Which part of research funding requires it to be done at the federal level rather than the states?
If anything we're under-funding it now for precisely that reason. The federal government extracts money from every state's tax base and then spends it on the F-35. Whereas the states have to compete with each other for talent, so California given their proportion of the same money would want to give it to UCLA or Berkeley to attract the sort of high-earning taxpayers who want to send their kids to those schools or graduate from them and stay in the state, or cause local research grant recipients to put down roots and found successful companies. And so would all the others.
"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
Washington seems to agree, for example this quote from his farewell address:
"It is important that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."
If you think about that a bit more deeply, if Washington and Jefferson had been fans of a strong federal government slavery would've been a federal policy as opposed to a per state policy and likely would've been much more difficult to end as the northern states would've contained slave owners as opposed to only the southern states.
the senate was the selected compromise in this regard. give each state 2 senators that collectively have the power to represent state interests with majority vote, while being less prone to the corruption of single individuals (governors).
But then we switched from US Senators being elected by the state legislatures to being elected by the general public, so now the Senate is no longer an meaningful check on the populist tendencies of the House and state governments have no representation on federal legislation anymore.
> Of most import, it means that the act does not ban the use of now-dominant predictive dialing technology that can call or text targeted customers
This seems incorrect. "Predictive dialing" sounds like it should meet the definition of a sequential dialer.
This ruling seems a little odd but also I understand why the court ruled the way it did, even if the grounds seem like an excessively tortured reading of the statute. (Like, there was probably an easier way to get this ruling.)
Predictive dialing refers to a system capable of placing calls that are likely to be answered by the called party at a time when the calling party is available. Under this ruling, such a system may or may not be an ATDS; the predictive capability is irrelevant.
The key distinction is not whether the system can dial numbers from a list randomly or sequentially, but whether it can generate numbers randomly or sequentially (as opposed to being provided by another party).
Based on my reading of the decision, this doesn't change anything to do with robocalls, as I understand the term: i.e. an unsolicited, automated call where you hear a recording when you pick up.
Those would still be illegal under TCPA, because either the use of "an artificial or prerecorded voice" or "automated dialing system" establishes the illegal action.
This case only deals with the definition of "automated dialing system".
Sounds like a straightforward case of congress not realizing how software would change the nature of robocalls 30 years after the law was passed. Looks like Congress will have to amend the law and this decision should not be seen as some sort of constitutional right to spam people.
> To the extent that interpretive canons accurately describe how the English language is generally used, they are useful tools. … [But w]hen this Court describes canons as rules or quotes canons while omitting their caveats and limitations, we only encourage the lower courts to relegate statutory interpretation to a series of if-then computations. No reasonable reader interprets texts that way. [Alito in concurrence]
Why would it be horrible if there were a well-defined grammar for legal texts?
1. What would a device having "the capacity to store a telephone number using a random or sequential number generator" look like? That seems self-contradictory.
2. Does this now mean any company can open up a phone book (or even more exhaustive source) and automatically dial every number and get away scot-free?
I can understand the ruling, but it sounds like it also means it's now pretty trivial to bypass restrictions by getting a massive list of numbers to dial from a third party.
You need to do better than that if you want to keep posting here. Comments like the GP are unacceptable because they're cheap internet dross, regardless of what politics you're battling for or against. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Perceptions like that are notoriously in the eye of the beholder. The other side sees HN as exactly the opposite sort of "echo chamber": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Neither side is assessing accurately—they're simply perceiving their own bias (or rather the inverted image of it) and calling that the entire community.
Consider the difference between the way the law and the platform treats transmission of spam calls over the telephone and pirated content over YouTube. You can tell which one is the concern of moneyed interests.
> 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.