valley via email so let me tell you mr levi if i had gotten that email i would have completed it i would have thought it was from some scam artist who was trying to sell me a long term health insurance or something some unknown sender in my box saying important message for you from med one solutions which is a good example of why e mail isn't the same thing as is regular mail regular mail you really have only to open the envelope and you see what it is and you're not infecting the rest of your house you know by opening the envelope but is that just for a court pointed out opening some scam e mail can draw your entire computer and so people were told not to do it before you could delete it you have to open it and you'll know that's not true at all you can you can put a little check and your e mail line and get rid of the thing before you ever far as just the head of the mail not the specific link type system your sad i'm just telling you at the very first screen when i look at my computer i see our new e mails come in who's it from well it might be from judge hamilton in which case i'll open it we're dealing with a case where a statute was written in one nine hundred seventy seven are applying it to modern technology and i would direct the court to the brief that was filed by the bureau of consumer financial protection specifically pages warning to the bureau notes that it's issued in advance notice of rule making to consider rules governing electronic delivery of validation notices and they are aware of this and we have a government agency and they continue and they say on page twenty five and we have a statute  the east china act met one on march twentieth and april seventeenth two thousand and fifteen when it sent its the mouse to the ball a it was not required to stay to communicate in writing it made a choice on march twentieth and april seventh and once it regular mail to the borrower and said we've got important information for you come pick it up at our office is that comply with the statute it would comply with the sec or of issue of the statute which again is a very critical aspect of this case is that what about the communication part you have an important message for you can your car come to our office and pick it up well certainly under that are going to know that you're a debt collector yet sixteen ninety two she gave you to send a letter and it says we've got important information for you about this debt come pick it up at our office that would not comply with sixty no nor if it's come pick it up at our office which is in the most dangerous neighborhood in town which is what the e mail with from an unknown sender with attachments looks like cyberspace is right i would agree with that but this case is not that case in this case yes it is she doesn't know ex ante who who you are like you why should she know that some random name it's not even like debt collectors inc you know it's med one solutions it makes it sound like it's medical makes it sound like yours selling son you know as i said some insurance product or some drug that everybody wants it'll restore your hair or you know it  sounds like could be anything it it's a it's a situation where to your question earlier on the frontline that's true but the hypothetical go to the most dangerous part of town that's analogous to seeing the attachment and that the record in this case establishes that she didn't see this click on a link for attachment and i have something about that too because there are cases that say once the debt collector has actual knowledge that an ordinary letter didn't reach the person didn't reach the debt or because it's come back from the post office marked undeliverable not receipt then you have to start all over again now as it happens with email it's actually pretty easy to have an electronic equivalent of a very secure way of knowing and you knew that she never went all the way through all these pages to the thing that actually finally after about the fourth screen would have revealed that this was actually a debt and it was from the hospital that she'd gone to and how much it was all of that so you had actual knowledge that your effort to drawing and and we noted this in our brief is we can't control whether a consumer opens a letter and the case is that if you refer to the cases that were cited by bally those cases also you have to send them to an address fine i was one step further down i am completely with you if you send a letter to an appropriate last known address and the post office tillerson as far as you know that's all that ever happened then we assume regular delivery on the part of the postal service and we assume that it's up to the consumer to open it up i'm talking about the tiny subset of those letters that actually come back to you soon know that they didn't get through you know the person wasn't at the address for some reason post office stamped on deliverable and sends it back to you i'm not talking about the vast majority of cases where you send a letter and you are entitled to a presumption of receipt i get the response that is the similar situation here is if we got a delivery notification that the e mail did through there is no indication no no i'm not i disagree with that the email went through but the e mail this cake to send sensitive communication issue looking at that first screen if i clicked on that e mail i would learn exactly zero about what you are trying to tell me why do i have to keep you know opening box after box after box to get to the bottom of it that's what judge hamilton is asking to do and i think that that the response to that is is twofold one there is the jurisdictional problem the valley did not testify that she went through those steps it is not yours to problem here secondarily is is that we really get into the why should she do that when consumers i think this is true wherever you work certainly true here at the courts we are told on practically a daily basis don't click on links that you don't know and trust don't open attachments that you don't know and trust because they're very likely to be some  malicious fisher and i would submit that if that's if that's the court's ultimately that it do it in a narrow grounds in the district court it such that the district court said we didn't send anything and if the court affirms that ruling you are essentially categorically boxing email of law you don't the actual fact that the basis of that and i don't know because the record wasn't developed it's not a defense of law it would be an argument that if consent was not secured by the there would be something in the record where the hospital would say oh and by the way when you give us your e mail you are also consenting to be contacted electronically by our debt collectors med one solutions and you have to log into your computer and send an electronic version of that consent back to dept that one solutions to verify that you really have the internet access that's necessary that's what eastside requires i find it frivolous to think that in this record that's what you did i feel like you would have been talking about it you have done it there's absolutely no evidence in the record that we complied and i did not mean to suggest that there was like past my time  email and if we take a low cost method of contacting potential shooters away from the debt collection we're just driving the costs up for everybody so do you see this is as a problem because it's pretty hard for me to see how compliance with the east signed act would be particularly easy in this situation we just stuck with the old snail mail i agree it's fraught with problems for consumers unless they are expecting you know this e mail and actually say yes i want to be contacted and that's going to be the rare situation where you have  collector contact and out of the blue so is there any reason to think that it's taking a step back that when she gave the hospital her e mail address she was consenting to  being contacted by the hospital via e mail to my knowledge there's no reason to believe in the in the record because that means the next question if you thought giving them her e mail address was enough and you might say  hospital said us and all of our agents with that somehow extend to a debt collector righted i think yes you're absolutely right there's that issue of whether consent to the of the original creditor would within a plot of the debt collector and there's also the the requirements of the son act and it appears are more than just saying yes you can contact me by email there are some specific requirements that you know for instance just giving your email because it and frankly appreciate the consumer financial protection bureau communion with information it's something certainly i should have raised and apologized to the corps but it's not an issue from our perspective that we ever got to because the it was so obvious that this information was not suit you know it's a sin the consumer a written notice containing and since it was not in the e mail as it's your propose and it was not there was no attachment to this e mail no it's just said a couple of links then you finally got to the page it with the attachments exactly you yes and that's you know really even more a lot of the discussion so far has been about and even that receive an e mail from a strange you know entity that you're not expecting and that's certainly an issue of a sow's you know clicking on a on a hyperlink in in an e mail particularly one because you think the big problem here if you had to settle on a theory is that the proper notice wasn't sent or that something was sent but it wasn't proper communication well i i don't i don't see a reason i guess from separating the entire phrase soon the consumer a written notice containing information that's not was the the phylicia that we focused on it's partly suit but it's the fact that i mean there was something got the problem with the use an act and then it has to contain and since it didn't wasn't in the text it said then they have an argument contain means that if you follow the breadcrumbs long enough you'll find the death note is just like you know my example of if somebody does this holiday times they give you a great big giant box at the holiday and you open the box and there's another box inside and you keep opening and finally there's a little jewelry box at the end of it  there would be something appear in this situation if the computer you're looking at the e mail on is knocked attached to the internet and you click on that nothing's going to happen there's no document that's going to pop up new information and so agreed that section seven zero four if you sign it's fifteen u s c seven zero zero four subsection b it provides that the bureau may through rulemaking interpret the application of the statutes under the bureau's jurisdiction fair debt collection practices act is one of them and in seven zero zero four d it specifically authorizes the bureau to exempt a category of electronic record such as for example email from east signs consent requirement now the bureau has issued an advance notice of proposed rule making regarding the fair debt collection practices act and among the issues  many many issues that the bureau is considering but among them is the use of electronic communication to deliver validation notices under the fair debt collection practices act so this is this notice has been for quite a while right is this the two thousand and thirteen it's a twenty thirteen no it's yes your honor but it's important to understand that the critical action practices sec was passed in one nine hundred seventy seven at that point of the federal trade commission had primary responsibility over the over the statute it was specifically precluded from engaging in rule making rule making authority came to the bureau is the first time there was a thirty to issue a broad rule came to the bureau  twenty eleven twenty thirteen the bureau issued its advance notice of proposed rule making it had a hundred sixty two number questions in the advance notice and there were many some parts were probably five or six hundred questions it elicited more than forty thousand comments in twenty sixteen the bureau took the next step it's the supreme process which is the small business review asked have a panel of small business is review an outline of the rules they did they submitted additional comments the the bureau's regulatory agenda has now scheduled tentatively the issuance of a notice of proposed rulemaking for next march so there's many many issues before the bureau it's the first time in forty years that any agency has had authority to engage in lawmaking so we just ask that if this court finds it appropriate to address each sign that it take account of the fact that on this problem that were raised about whether a customer's providing e mail to one answer to you like a hospital or in this case should suffice as consent to having  number one the question asked about whether the e mail was sent or whether it's a proper communication certainly we think the crux of this case and to the extent the court is going to evaluate the manner in which the communication was made  should be in the context of the communication not that something wasn't sense which we believe the record stablish is was second on the substantive issue with the sign act our position would be that the east sign act would apply to a situation where there is a voicemail or an oral communication that is the initial communication and then you are required within five days to issue something in writing again on march twentieth and april seventeenth that one had a choice how to communicate it chose to communicate in writing but we do not believe that implicates the requirement of the sign act that it would apply in situations where there is an initial communication this is not your theory is that you know since the collector gets to decide the method of communication and therefore e mail is available just regardless of the year you sign up and in this very limited situation with a statute that gives the choice most of the statutes that he sign is going to apply to will not give this choice and the only mandatory time when a notice under sixty nine hundred two cheap must be in writing is after there is an initial communication that does not contain the disclosures then you have to make it in writing so because they chose to make it in writing would not believe that implicating someone all right thank you very much thanks to all coun