Background
Michael Jackson, a retired West Virginia law-enforcement officer, filed putative class actions against five companies, including Thryv, alleging that their online people-search services disclosed his home address and unpublished telephone number without permission. He sought declaratory and injunctive relief, statutory damages, and attorneys’ fees under West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law.
The challenged provision prohibits disclosing the home address or unpublished home or personal telephone number of a covered person when a reasonable person would believe the disclosure would expose someone to harassment or a risk of harm to life or property. Covered persons include active, formerly active, and retired judicial officers, prosecutors, federal and state public defenders and assistant public defenders, and law-enforcement officers; the law also protects people residing at covered persons’ home addresses.
The district court consolidated the defendants’ motions and dismissed the actions under Rule 12(b)(6), holding the provision facially unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It found the law content based and insufficiently tailored because liability could arise without notice that removal had been requested or knowledge that the disclosed information concerned a protected person.
The Court’s Holding
The Fourth Circuit affirmed. It held that publishing home addresses and telephone numbers constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment, even though the information consists of factual data. The law was content based because whether a disclosure was prohibited depended on both the type of information disclosed and whether it concerned a person within a protected category. Strict scrutiny therefore applied.
Although protecting judicial and law-enforcement personnel and other covered public servants is a compelling governmental interest, the court held that the provision was not the least restrictive means of advancing that interest. Liability attached immediately without requiring the publisher to know that the information concerned a covered person or first receive a removal request. The court concluded that this structure risked substantial self-censorship and burdened more protected speech than necessary.
The court rejected Jackson’s arguments for less demanding review. The provision did not escape strict scrutiny as a confidentiality law, and the defendants’ economic motivation did not convert all regulated disclosures into commercial speech. The statute applied equally to commercial and noncommercial messages.
Key Takeaways
- Publishing factual data such as home addresses and telephone numbers is protected speech under the First Amendment.
- A restriction keyed to both the information disclosed and the identity or occupation of the person concerned is content based and subject to strict scrutiny.
- West Virginia’s provision failed strict scrutiny because it imposed liability without knowledge or prior notice and removal procedures, making it broader than necessary to protect covered officials and household residents.
Why It Matters
The decision recognizes the government’s compelling interest in protecting justice-system personnel while requiring privacy laws that restrict truthful information to use the least speech-restrictive means. The court emphasized that a notice-and-removal procedure is one possible way to narrow such a law, though not necessarily the only constitutionally permissible approach.
The ruling also signals substantial First Amendment risk for data-privacy statutes that impose immediate liability on publishers unaware that otherwise lawfully collected information concerns a protected person.