The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Facebook v. Duguid, a case involving automated telephone dialing systems (ATDS). CUNA filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit in September supporting a narrow scope for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s (TCPA) definition of an ATDS.

Specifically, CUNA’s brief raises concerns about the TCPA’s effect on credit unions who may rely on systems to contact members with time-sensitive information regarding their accounts, including mandatory servicing calls and fraud alerts.

CUNA’s brief supports Facebook’s argument that consumer harms can be avoided by narrowly defining an ATDS as only equipment that has the capacity to generate random or sequential numbers and to automatically call those numbers.

CUNA maintains that a broad definition of ATDS “does nothing to curb illegal robocalls by bad actors,” as noted in the brief, but “it does further open the floodgates of litigation against credit unions and other legitimate companies.”