Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger. On today's show, Spokio, this case at the Supreme Court

recently came down, and Spokio is a search engine for people. But unlike your phone book

or the white pages, Spokio claims to glean its information from public databases, such as your

social media profile. So when the site allegedly posted false information about a man named

Thomas Robbins, he sued. And on May 16th, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Spokio v. Robbins.

The latest line in a line of cases where the court tries to flesh out when a plaintiff is

allowed to sue in federal court, that is, whether the plaintiff has so-called standing.

Joining me to discuss this is Adam J. White, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and of counsel at Boyden Gray and Associates, where he represented Tech Freedom in the open Internet order case over the FCC's net neutrality regulations. Adam, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.

So what exactly is Robbins alleging that Spokio did to him that would warrant a lawsuit in a federal court?

Well, Robbins is alleging that Spokio holds itself out as a database on all the relevant

information about a person's personal details, including their creditworthiness.

And in this case, he says, Spokio just has me wrong.

The information that they've published about me,

my demographic information, where I've lived and so on, it's just incorrect. Now, he hasn't said,

as I understand it, he hasn't said where the search was run, who ran the search, or how he found

out that the information about him was wrong. But he says the information that you have about

me is wrong,

and that violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal statute that requires consumer reporting

agencies, and it's alleged here that Spokio is a consumer reporting agency, the act requires

those to do the best they can, take all reasonable measures to maintain the maximum accuracy

of information about creditworthiness. He says in this case, Spokio, you haven't done that. You've

violated the statute and the statute gives me a right to sue. So here I am. Hypothetically,

...