Few things unite Americans like our shared hatred of robocalls, which have become a daily affliction for too many of us.
So the Supreme Court’s recent ruling undermining the main federal law against robocalls was a slap to the face, on the side that’s usually pressed against your smartphone.
Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Sonya Sotomayor declared that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to robocalls made by equipment that manages to find your phone by happenstance, either by generating numbers automatically or dialing them randomly. Calls deliberately dialed from a stored number database are exempt.
In other words, the justices laid out a road map for telemarketers, scammers and the rest of the hellish robocall fraternity to ping your phone with impunity. Kinda sorta.
There is still the federal Do Not Call list, but that’s notoriously ineffective. And there’s a separate set of prohibitions on debt collectors, although that hasn’t deterred collectors of fake debt.