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TCPA lawsuit passes Spokeo, survives motion to dismiss
On February 20, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied a national insurance company’s motion to dismiss a proposed Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action suit brought by a California-based plumbing company. The plaintiff had sued the insurance company and one of its agents for using an autodialer to make prerecorderd sales calls. One call was answered by the plaintiff’s principal and interrupted business, which Plaintiff alleges violated the TCPA. The plaintiff also alleges that the autodialed calls “seized and trespassed upon the use of its cell phones.” In its motion to dismiss, the insurance company argued, among other things, that the plaintiff failed to allege a concrete injury, which is required to establish standing. Citing the Supreme Court ruling in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, the judge held that the plaintiff had alleged sufficient facts, including the disruption to its business, to establish a concrete harm.
Supreme Court denies writ challenging data breach standing
On February 20, the U.S. Supreme Court denied without comment a medical insurance company’s petition for writ of certiorari to challenge an August 2017 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which reversed the dismissal of a data breach suit filed by the company’s policyholders in 2015. According to the D.C. Circuit opinion, the policyholders sued the medical insurance company after the company announced that an unauthorized party had accessed personal information for 1.1 million members. The lower court dismissed the policyholder’s case, holding that they did not have standing because they could not show an actual injury based on the data breach. In reversing the lower court’s decision, the D.C. Circuit, citing the Supreme Court ruling in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, held that it was plausible that the unauthorized party “has both the intent and the ability to use [the] data for ill.” This was sufficient to show that the policyholders had standing to bring the claims because they alleged a plausible risk of future injury.
Supreme Court denies cert petition in Spokeo
On January 22, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a second petition for writ of certiorari in Spokeo v. Robins, thereby declining to reconsider its position on Article III’s standing to sue requirements or to provide further clarification on what constitutes injury in fact. Citing “widespread confusion” over how to determine whether intangible injuries qualify as injury in fact, and therefore meet the standing threshold, Spokeo argued in its petition that review is “warranted to ensure that the jurisdiction asserted by the federal courts remains within constitutional limits.” The second petition was filed by Spokeo last December to request a review of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s August 2017 decision—on remand from the Supreme Court (see Buckley Sandler Special Alert here)—which ruled that Robins had established standing to sue for alleged violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by claiming an intangible statutory injury without any additional harm. The 9th Circuit opined that information contained in a consumer report about age, marital status, educational background, and employment history is important for employment and loan applications, home purchases, and more, and that it “does not take much imagination to understand how inaccurate reports on such a broad range of material facts about Robins’s life could be deemed a real harm.” Further, guaranteeing the accuracy of such information “seems directly and substantially related to FCRA’s goals.” The 9th Circuit reversed and remanded the case to the Central District of California after finding that Robins had adequately alleged the essential elements of standing (see previous InfoBytes coverage here).
Second Circuit Cites Spokeo, Rules No Standing to Sue for Violation of FACTA
On September 19, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion ruling that a merchant who had printed the first six numbers of a consumer’s credit card on a receipt violated the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), but that because the violation did not cause a concrete injury, the consumer did not have standing to sue the merchant. Under FACTA, merchants are prohibited from including more than the final five digits of a consumer’s credit card number on a receipt. In this instance, the plaintiff filed a complaint in 2014, followed by an amended complaint later that same year, in which he alleged that he twice received printed receipts containing the first six digits of his credit card number, in violation of FACTA. The plaintiff claimed that the risk of identity theft was a sufficient injury to establish standing. The defendants argued that that the first six digits of the credit card account only identified the card issuer and did not reveal any information about the consumer, which did not “raise a material risk of identity theft.” Citing a Supreme Court ruling in Spokeo v. Robins, the district court opined that a procedural violation of a statute is not enough to allow a consumer to sue, because it must be shown that the violation caused, or at least created a material risk of, harm to the consumer—which, in this case, was not present. Accordingly, the appellate court affirmed the district court’s dismissal for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, but found that the district court erred in dismissing the suit with prejudice.
District Court Cites Spokeo, Refuses to Certify TCPA Class Action Suit
On August 15, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division granted a pet health insurance company’s (defendants) motion to strike class allegations in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) lawsuit over alleged robocalls. Citing a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spokeo v. Robins, the judge opined that because evidence proved some of the class members agreed to receive calls, plaintiffs failed to establish a lack of consent and could therefore not claim to have suffered a concrete injury. In 2014, plaintiffs filed a suit against the defendants proposing certification of two classes—“advertisement” and “robocall”—alleging that calls were made to individuals’ cell phones without specific consent and arguing that these calls were a form of “advertising,” which, pursuant to FTC rules, requires express written consent. However, the defendants’ position—for which the judge ruled in favor—was that because affidavits signed by individuals during the pet adoption process show that some of the class members consented to receive calls about special offers (electing not to opt-out), these individuals would not be able to prove injury under the Spokeo standard. Thus, issues of individualized consent would predominate, making it impossible for plaintiffs to “establish a lack of consent with generalized evidence.” Furthermore, the court stated that if plaintiffs agreed to receive calls—as defendants claim a significant number did, just not in writing—a lack of written evidence does not make the calls unsolicited.
Ninth Circuit Rules FCRA Plaintiff Has Article III Standing
On August 15, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion, on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling that a consumer plaintiff could proceed with his Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) claims because he had sufficiently alleged a “concrete” injury and therefore had standing to sue under Article III of the Constitution. Robins v. Spokeo, Inc., No. 11-56843, 2017 WL 3480695 (9th Cir. Aug. 15, 2017). By way of background, the plaintiff had alleged that the defendant consumer reporting agency “willfully violated various procedural requirements under FCRA,” and consequently published an inaccurate consumer report on its website that “falsely stated his age, marital status, wealth, education level, and profession” and “included a photo of a different person.” In May 2016, the Supreme Court vacated an earlier Ninth Circuit decision, finding that the court failed to consider an essential element of Article III standing: whether the plaintiff alleged a “concrete” injury. (See previous Special Alert here.) After providing some guidance—including that the plaintiff’s injury must be “real” and not “abstract” or merely “procedural”—the high court remanded to the Ninth Circuit for further consideration.
On remand, the court first asked “whether the statutory provisions at issue were established to protect [the plaintiff’s] concrete interests (as opposed to purely procedural rights).” The court answered affirmatively, finding that “the FCRA procedures at issue in this case were crafted to protect consumers’ . . . concrete interest in accurate credit reporting about themselves.” Next, the court asked “whether the specific procedural violations alleged in this case actually harm, or present a material risk of harm to, such interests.” The court again answered affirmatively, finding that the plaintiff sufficiently alleged that he suffered a “real harm” to his “concrete interests in truthful credit reporting.” That is, the plaintiff sufficiently alleged that the defendant “prepared . . . an [inaccurate] report,” “that it then published the report on the Internet,” and that “the nature of the specific alleged reporting inaccuracies” was not “trivial or meaningless,” but instead covered “a broad range of material facts” about the plaintiff’s life “that may be important to employers or others making use of a consumer report.” Finally, the court found that the plaintiff’s allegations were not too speculative, because “both the challenged conduct and the attendant injury have already occurred.” After reaffirming that the plaintiff had adequately alleged the other essential elements of standing, the court remanded to the Central District of California for further proceedings.
Second Circuit Affirms No Actual Harm in FACTA Suit
On June 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that, without concrete evidence of actual harm, a consumer lacks standing under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) to sue a merchant for printing credit card expiration dates on receipts. The consumer alleged that printing the expiration date on her credit card receipt led to a material risk of identity theft, and therefore constituted an injury-in-fact sufficient to confer Article III standing. The court disagreed, noting that Congress’s amendments to FACTA belie that expiration dates on credit card receipts increase the risk of identity theft. Moreover, the court held that the consumer failed to allege actual harm from the merchant’s practice.
The court’s decision in Cruper-Wienmann comes approximately one month after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540, 194 L. Ed. 2d 635 (2016), as revised (May 24, 2016), which held that “bare procedural violation[s], divorced from any concrete harm” are not enough to establish standing.
D.C. Circuit Finds District Court Lacks Jurisdiction in Case Alleging Violations of D.C. Consumer Protection Laws
On July 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the district court’s ruling, opining that the plaintiffs in a putative class action failed to establish Article III standing to file suit in federal court. Hancock v. Urban Outfitters, Inc., No. 14-7047, WL 3996710 (D.C. Cir. July 26, 2016). In 2013, the consumer plaintiffs filed a complaint alleging that two D.C. retail stores violated the Identification Information Act, D.C. Code § 47-3151 et seq., and D.C. Consumer Protection Procedure Act, D.C. Code § 28-3901 et seq., by requesting the plaintiffs’ zip codes at the time of purchase. The district court dismissed the complaint, concluding that the plaintiffs had failed to state a claim. As such, the district court ruled that it was unnecessary to address the stores’ jurisdictional argument that the plaintiffs failed to plead an injury sufficient for Article III standing. Citing the recent Spokeo v. Robins Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit disagreed: “The Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo thus closes the door on [the plaintiffs’] claim that the Stores’ mere request for a zip code, standing alone, amounted to an Article III injury.” “Because the plaintiffs have not alleged any concrete injury in fact stemming from alleged violations of D.C. law,” the D.C. Circuit held that “the district court lacked jurisdiction to decide the merits of the case.” The D.C. Circuit vacated the district court’s judgment on the merits and remanded with instructions to dismiss the complaint.
Special Alert: SCOTUS Vacates Ninth Circuit Decision in Case Alleging Procedural FCRA Violations
On May 16, the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion vacating the Ninth Circuit’s 2014 ruling that a plaintiff had standing under Article III of the Constitution to sue an alleged consumer reporting agency as defined by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), for alleged procedural violations of the FCRA, 15 U.S.C § 1681 et seq. Spokeo v. Robins, No. 13-1339 (U.S. May 16, 2016). According to plaintiff Thomas Robins, the reporting agency violated his individualized (rather than collective) statutory rights by reporting inaccurate credit information regarding Robins’s wealth, job status, graduate degree, and marital status in willful noncompliance with certain FCRA requirements. In a 6-2 opinion delivered by Justice Alito, the Court ruled that Robins could not establish standing by alleging a bare procedural violation because Article III requires a concrete injury even in the context of statutory violation. Here, the Ninth Circuit erred in failing to consider separately both the “concrete and particularized” aspects of the injury-in-fact component of standing. The Court opined that the Ninth Circuit’s analysis was incomplete:
[T]he injury-in-fact requirement requires a plaintiff to allege an injury that is both “concrete and particularized.” Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 180-181 (2000) (emphasis added). The Ninth Circuit’s analysis focused on the second characteristic (particularity), but it overlooked the first (concreteness). We therefore…remand for the Ninth Circuit to consider both aspects of the injury-in-fact requirement.
Relying on case law, the Court emphasized that the “irreducible constitutional minimum” of Article III’s standing to sue relies on the plaintiff demonstrating (i) an injury-in-fact; (ii) that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant; and (iii) that the injury is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S., 560-561 (U.S. June 12, 1992); Friends of the Earth, Inc., 528 U.S., at 180-181. Spokeo primarily revolves around the first element, establishing an injury-in-fact. Again relying on Lujan, the Court reasoned that to establish injury-in-fact, the plaintiff must “show that he or she suffered ‘an invasion of a legally protected interest’ that is ‘concrete and particularized’ and ‘actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.’” Lujan, at 560. According to the Court, the Ninth Circuit’s discussion of Robins’s standing to sue, and in particular its discussion of whether Robins had articulated an individualized statutory right rather than a collective right, concerned only the particularization element of establishing an injury-in-fact. The Court stated that the Ninth Circuit’s standing analysis was incomplete because it had failed to consider whether the “concreteness” requirement for an injury-in-fact—whether Robins had a “real” and “not abstract” injury—also had been satisfied. While the Court did make clear that a concrete injury could be intangible and that Congress may identify intangible harms that meet minimum Article III requirements, it noted that “Congress’ role in identifying and elevating intangible harms does not mean that a plaintiff automatically satisfies the injury-in-fact requirement whenever a statute grants a person a statutory right and purports to authorize that person to sue to vindicate that right.”
The Court noted that because the Ninth Circuit had not fully distinguished concreteness from particularization, it had failed to consider whether the reporting agency’s procedural violations of the FCRA constituted a sufficient degree of risk to Robins to meet the concreteness standard. The Court observed that while a procedural violation of the FCRA may, in some cases, be sufficient to establish a concrete injury-in-fact, not all inaccuracies in consumer information, i.e. an incorrect zip code, cause harm or a material risk of harm. Further, because “Article III standing requires a concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation” the Court explained that “Robins cannot satisfy the demands of Article III by alleging a bare procedural violation.”
The Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s judgment, and remanded the case for the Ninth Circuit to consider both aspects of the injury-in-fact requirement.
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Questions regarding the matters discussed in this Alert may be directed to any of our lawyers listed below, or to any other BuckleySandler attorney with whom you have consulted in the past.
- Amanda Raines Lawrence, (202) 349-8089
- Fredrick Levin, (310) 424-3984
- Andrew Louis, (202) 349-8061
State AGs File Amicus Brief With U.S. Supreme Court in FCRA Standing Case
On September 9, the Massachusetts Attorney General announced that her office, along with 12 other states and the District of Columbia, had filed with the U.S. Supreme Court an amicus brief supporting the plaintiff-respondent in Spokeo v. Robins. (Previous InfoBytes coverage can be seen here). The putative class-action plaintiff in that case claimed that an online data broker published inaccurate information about him in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Reversing the district court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the violation of a statutory right created by FCRA was, in itself, a sufficient injury to confer standing to sue under Article III of the Constitution. In their multistate amicus brief, the AGs argued that the Supreme Court should affirm this holding. The states asserted that businesses frequently rely on consumer data profiles to make important credit, employment, housing, and insurance decisions. However, “the damage done by . . . an inaccurate data profile is frequently impossible for the affected consumer to detect or quantify,” they argued. Accordingly, “Congress rightly has authorized statutory damages for a willful violation of the FCRA.” The AGs asserted that, given their limited resources, statutory damage cases and private class actions are needed to supplement their own consumer protection actions.