In the

United States Court of Appeals

for the Seventh Circuit

____________________ 

No. 22-1202 

MARY C. NABOZNY, on behalf of herself

and others similarly situated,

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v.

OPTIO SOLUTIONS LLC d/b/a

QUALIA COLLECTION SERVICES, 

Defendant-Appellee. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Western District of Wisconsin. 

No. 21-cv-297 — James D. Peterson, Chief Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED SEPTEMBER 29, 2022 — DECIDED OCTOBER 23, 2023 

____________________ 

Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and ROVNER and JACKSONAKIWUMI, Circuit Judges. 

SYKES, Chief Judge. Optio Solutions LLC sent Mary 

Nabozny a letter seeking to collect a defaulted credit-card

debt. Optio used RevSpring, Inc., a third-party mail vendor, 

to print and send the letter. Nabozny responded with this 

lawsuit accusing Optio of violating the Fair Debt Collection 
2 No. 22-1202 

Practices Act (“FDCPA” or “the Act”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692 

et seq. She claims that by using a third-party vendor to print 

and mail the letter, Optio violated § 1692c(b) of the Act, 

which bars debt collectors from communicating with anyone 

other than the debtor when attempting to collect a consumer

debt. (There are several exceptions, but none apply here.) 

Nabozny proposes to represent a class of debtors who 

received similar letters from Optio. 

This lawsuit suffers from a jurisdictional defect: Nabozny 

sustained no injury from the alleged statutory violation. The 

district judge accordingly dismissed the suit for lack of 

standing. Nabozny v. Optio Sols., LLC, 583 F. Supp. 3d 1209, 

1215 (W.D. Wis. 2022). Nabozny appealed. 

After the parties filed their briefs, the Eleventh Circuit 

addressed a materially identical FDCPA case and rejected a 

standing argument much like the one Nabozny makes here.

Hunstein v. Preferred Collection & Mgmt. Servs., Inc., 48 F.4th 

1236 (11th Cir. 2022) (en banc). Sitting en banc and applying

the Supreme Court’s instructions in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 

578 U.S. 330 (2016), and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 141 S. Ct. 

2190 (2021), the Eleventh Circuit held that this kind of 

§ 1692c(b) violation—sharing a debtor’s data with a thirdparty mail vendor to populate and send a form collection 

letter—causes no harm that our legal tradition recognizes as 

sufficient to support a suit in federal court under Article III 

of the Constitution. Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1245. The Tenth 

Circuit has since reached the same conclusion. Shields v. Pro. 

Bureau of Collections of Md., Inc., 55 F.4th 823, 828–29 

(10th Cir. 2022) (adopting the reasoning of Hunstein). We 

agree with our sister circuits and affirm the dismissal of 

Nabozny’s suit. 
No. 22-1202 3 

I. Background

We take the following factual allegations from Nabozny’s 

class-action complaint, accepting them as true for present 

purposes. In July 2020 Nabozny received a letter at her home 

in Ashland County, Wisconsin, offering to settle an unpaid

credit-card debt. The letter summarized basic information 

about her debt: the creditor, the outstanding balance, the 

account number, and her name and address. The letter was 

from Optio Solutions under its operating name of Qualia 

Collection Services, but it was printed and mailed by

RevSpring, Inc., a third-party printing and mail vendor. 

Nabozny did not give Optio consent to share the information about her debt with RevSpring. 

Nabozny sued Optio alleging that its communication 

with RevSpring, the third-party mail vendor, violated 

§ 1692c(b) of the FDCPA, which provides that “a debt collector may not communicate, in connection with the collection 

of any debt, with any person other than the consumer” 

without the consumer’s consent. (There are a few exceptions—e.g., the statute exempts communications with the 

debtor’s attorney and the creditor and its attorney. None of 

the exceptions are relevant here.) Nabozny’s lawsuit was 

styled as a proposed class action: she sought to represent a 

class of other Wisconsin residents who had received similar 

collection letters from Optio via RevSpring. 

Optio moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, arguing 

that Nabozny lacks standing to sue because the alleged

statutory violation, even if it occurred, caused her no injury. 

Nabozny responded, urging the court to follow a then-recent 

decision by an Eleventh Circuit panel that had found stand-
4 No. 22-1202 

ing in a nearly identical § 1692c(b) case. See Hunstein v. 

Preferred Collection & Mgmt. Servs, Inc., 994 F.3d 1341 

(11th Cir. Apr. 21, 2021), vacated and superseded on reh’g,

17 F.4th 1016 (11th Cir. Oct. 28, 2021), reh’g en banc granted, 

17 F.4th 1103 (11th Cir. Nov. 17, 2021). 

The Hunstein panel opinion had a short shelf life. By the 

time the district court addressed Optio’s motion, the full 

Eleventh Circuit had agreed to hear Hunstein en banc. Accordingly, the judge declined Nabozny’s invitation to follow 

the now-vacated Eleventh Circuit panel opinion in Hunstein. 

Nabozny, 583 F. Supp. 3d at 1214 & n.2. The judge instead 

dismissed Nabozny’s suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, holding that Nabozny lacks standing to sue because she 

“suffered no concrete injury.” Id. at 1215. 

II. Discussion

Article III of the Constitution limits the federal judicial 

power to resolving “Cases” and “Controversies,” 

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 2, a principle long understood to 

confine the federal judiciary to its “constitutionally limited 

role of adjudicating actual and concrete disputes” presented 

in a form traditionally recognized as appropriate for judicial 

decision and the resolution of which will “have direct consequences on the parties involved,” Genesis Healthcare Corp. 

v. Symczyk, 569 U.S. 66, 71 (2013). An essential component of 

the case-or-controversy limitation is the requirement that a 

plaintiff have standing to sue—that is, a “personal stake” in 

the outcome of the suit sufficient to engage the jurisdiction 

of the federal court. TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2203.

To establish standing, the “plaintiff must show (i) that he 

suffered an injury in fact that is concrete, particularized, and 
No. 22-1202 5 

actual or imminent; (ii) that the injury was likely caused by 

the defendant; and (iii) that the injury would likely be 

redressed by judicial relief.” Id. Without “an injury that the 

defendant caused and the court can remedy, there is no case 

or controversy” under Article III. Casillas v. Madison Ave. 

Assocs., Inc., 926 F.3d 329, 333 (7th Cir. 2019). 

As the party seeking to invoke federal jurisdiction, 

Nabozny bears the burden of establishing her standing to 

sue. Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 561 (1992); Pierre v. 

Midland Credit Mgmt., 29 F.4th 934, 939 (7th Cir. 2022). This 

case comes to us from a dismissal at the pleading stage, so it 

raises a facial challenge to standing. We therefore look to 

Nabozny’s complaint to assess whether her allegations of 

injury, accepted as true, are sufficient to support her standing to sue. Flynn v. FCA US LLC, 39 F.4th 946, 952 (7th Cir. 

2022). Our standard of review is de novo. Id.

This case turns on the injury-in-fact requirement and, 

more specifically, whether Nabozny suffered an actual,

concrete injury. To be concrete, an injury must be “real, and 

not abstract.” Spokeo, 578 U.S. at 340 (quotation marks omitted). Tangible harms like monetary and physical harms are 

the most obvious, but “[v]arious intangible harms can also 

be concrete.” TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2204. When a plaintiff’s claim involves an allegation of intangible harm, the 

injury-in-fact inquiry turns on whether the harm “has a 

‘close relationship’ to a harm ‘traditionally’ recognized as 

providing a basis for a lawsuit in American courts.” Id. 

(quoting Spokeo, 578 U.S. at 341). Examples include reputational harms, privacy harms like intrusion upon seclusion 

and giving publicity to private information, and “harms 

specified by the Constitution itself.” Id. 
6 No. 22-1202 

In some cases, Congress’s exercise of its legislative power 

to promulgate regulatory obligations and create a private

cause of action for violations may serve to “elevate to the 

status of legally cognizable injuries concrete, de facto injuries 

that were previously inadequate in law.” Spokeo, 578 U.S. at 

341 (quotation marks and alteration omitted). The judgment 

of Congress is “instructive and important,” id., but the 

judiciary has an independent duty to decide whether a 

plaintiff has suffered an actual injury and thus has a sufficient stake in the outcome to invoke the jurisdiction of a 

federal court, TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2205. Put slightly 

differently, “Congress’s creation of a statutory prohibition or 

obligation and a cause of action does not relieve courts of 

their responsibility to independently decide whether a 

plaintiff has suffered a concrete harm under Article III ... .” 

Id. Although “Congress may elevate harms that exist in the 

real world” to actionable legal status, “it may not simply 

enact an injury into existence, using its lawmaking power to 

transform something that is not remotely harmful into 

something that is.” Id. (quoting Hagy v. Demers & Adams, 

882 F.3d 616, 622 (6th Cir. 2018)). 

Because Article III requires a concrete injury “even in the 

context of a statutory violation,” Spokeo, 578 U.S. at 341, 

legislatively identified intangible harms “must bear a close 

relationship in kind to those underlying suits at common 

law.” Pierre, 29 F.4th at 938. A claimed injury from a statutory violation need not be an “exact duplicate” of a harm 

traditionally recognized as actionable at common law, but 

the plaintiff must identify “a close historical or common-law 

analogue.” TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2204; Ewing v. MED-1 

Sols., LLC, 24 F.4th 1146, 1151 (7th Cir. 2022). 
No. 22-1202 7 

Nabozny alleges in her complaint that Optio’s violation 

of § 1692c(b) harmed her by “invading her privacy.” She

elaborates a bit in her brief, arguing that because Optio

disclosed information about her debt to its third-party mail 

vendor, she suffered a loss of her ability to control her 

personal financial information. And that harm, she contends, 

is analogous to the harm caused by a tortious invasion of 

privacy and thus qualifies as a concrete injury for standing

purposes. 

We disagree. And we are in good company in rejecting 

this argument. In Hunstein—a materially identical § 1692c(b) 

case involving a debt collector’s use of a third-party mail 

vendor to process a form collection letter—the en banc 

Eleventh Circuit considered the privacy-tort analogy in 

depth and rejected it, concluding that the plaintiff lacked 

standing to sue because he suffered no cognizable injury 

from the alleged statutory violation. 48 F.4th at 1241–50. The 

Tenth Circuit has since endorsed Hunstein. Shields, 55 F.4th 

at 828–29. No other circuit has held to the contrary. It would 

take a strong reason for us to create a circuit split, and we 

decline to do so here.

There is no need to repeat the Eleventh Circuit’s exhaustive analysis in full; a briefer explanation of our reasoning 

will suffice. As we’ve noted, Nabozny generically analogizes 

her alleged injury to a tortious invasion of privacy, but at 

common law an invasion of the right to privacy has traditionally encompassed four distinct torts: intrusion upon 

seclusion, appropriation of another person’s name or likeness, publicity given to another person’s private life, and 

publicity that places one in a false light. RESTATEMENT 

(SECOND) OF TORTS § 652A (AM. LAW INST. 1977). 
8 No. 22-1202 

Looking beyond Nabozny’s bare invasion-of-privacy allegation to the relevant factual allegations in her complaint, 

see Persinger v. Sw. Credit Sys., L.P., 20 F.4th 1184, 1191–92 

(7th Cir. 2021), it becomes clear that only one of the four

privacy torts is even potentially relevant: the tort of publicity 

given to another person’s private life or, as some sources 

phrase it, the public disclosure of private facts. A person 

commits this civil wrong if he “gives publicity” to a matter

that concerns “the private life of another,” is “highly offensive to a reasonable person,” and is not of legitimate public 

concern. RESTATEMENT § 652D. 

Nabozny’s attempt to analogize her case to this privacy 

tort falls apart on the threshold element of publicity.

Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1245–49. “‘Publicity’ ... means that the 

matter is made public, by communicating it to the public at 

large, or to so many persons that the matter must be regarded as substantially certain to become one of public 

knowledge.” RESTATEMENT § 652D cmt. a. Nabozny’s complaint is devoid of any allegations that Optio made her

private information public. Rather, she alleges no more than 

the following: Optio disclosed pieces of her private debt 

information to RevSpring, and RevSpring used this information to populate a form collection letter and sent it to 

Nabozny. Even as Nabozny sees it, that was the end of the 

matter. Nothing in the complaint suggests any manner of 

public disclosure or even that anyone at RevSpring read or 

appreciated her information. Indeed, the final recipient of 

the information was Nabozny herself. 

The transmission of information to a single ministerial

intermediary does not remotely resemble the publicity 

element of the only possibly relevant variant of the privacy 
No. 22-1202 9 

tort. See Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1245; Shields, 55 F.4th at 828–29. 

Publicity “does not include just ‘any communication by the 

defendant to a third person.’” Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1246 

(quoting RESTATEMENT § 652D cmt. a). Nor is it enough “to 

communicate a fact concerning the plaintiff’s private life ... 

to a small group of persons.” RESTATEMENT § 652D cmt. a. To 

constitute publicity, a communication must “reach[], or [be] 

sure to reach, the public.” Id.

The distinction between public and private communication is not just a matter of numbers. “[T]his is a qualitative 

inquiry, not a quantitative one.” Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1246. 

So while the number of recipients might be a relevant consideration, we must do more than simply count heads. A 

disclosure might be sure to reach the public, for example, if

communicated to a journalist—a single person—for later 

publication in a newspaper or magazine. See id. at 1247. By 

contrast, there is no “publicity” given to private facts when a 

creditor writes to a debtor’s employer—also a single person—to inform him that the debtor “owes [a] debt and will 

not pay it.” RESTATEMENT § 652D cmt. a, illus. 1. Information 

can remain private, too, even when disclosed to many. For 

example, “[w]hen a trade secret is communicated to thousands of new employees after a merger,” it does not suddenly “become public information.” Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1247.

As these illustrations show, when a private communication 

is sent with no expectation of further disclosure, it is not one 

that is “sure to reach[] the public.” RESTATEMENT § 652D 

cmt. a. And in that case, there is no actionable “publicity” 

given to private facts. 

Because Nabozny’s complaint does not allege that Optio 

publicized her private information, she has not suffered a 
10 No. 22-1202 

cognizable injury—or as the Eleventh Circuit put it, “at least 

not one that is at all similar to that suffered after a public 

disclosure” of private facts. Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1245. The 

public-disclosure form of the privacy tort protects against 

the humiliation that accompanies the disclosure of sensitive 

or scandalizing private information to public scrutiny. See 

RESTATEMENT § 652D cmt. b (“When ... intimate details of ... 

life are spread before the public gaze in a manner highly 

offensive to the ordinary reasonable man, there is an actionable invasion of his privacy ... .”). Without a publicexposure component, Nabozny’s alleged injury is not analogous to the harm at the core of the public-disclosure tort. 

Indeed, “having some finite number of people know (true) 

details about your life is fundamentally different than 

having that information disseminated to the general public.” 

Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1249. 

Nabozny argues that Hunstein conflicts with our decision 

in Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, Inc., 950 F.3d 458 (7th Cir. 

2020). In Gadelhak we held that analogizing to common-law 

harms requires us to look only for “a close relationship in 

kind, not degree.” Id. at 462 (quotation marks omitted). That 

remains true even after TransUnion. Still, Hunstein and 

Gadelhak are easily reconcilable. As we’ve already explained, 

“[p]rivate disclosure is not just a less extreme form of public 

disclosure.” Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1249; see also Shields, 

55 F.4th at 829. Because Nabozny “did not allege any publicity at all, we cannot analyze the degree of that nonpublicity.” Hunstein, 48 F.4th at 1249. In other words, because allegations of publicity are altogether missing from 

Nabozny’s complaint, her injury from the alleged § 1692c(b) 

violation—if one exists at all—is different in kind from that 
No. 22-1202 11 

which the common law traditionally has recognized as 

actionable.

Nabozny also relies on Fox v. Dakkota Integrated Systems, 

LLC, 980 F.3d 1146 (7th Cir. 2020), and Cothron v. White Castle 

System, Inc., 20 F.4th 1156 (7th Cir. 2021), but those cases do 

not help her. Fox and Cothron raised Article III standing 

questions in the context of claims under the Illinois 

Biometric Informational Privacy Act. In Fox we recognized 

that biometric identifiers are uniquely “immutable, and once 

compromised, are compromised forever.” 980 F.3d at 1155. 

We explained that the unlawful collection or retention of 

that kind of immutable personal identifying information 

invades the “private domain, much like an act of trespass.” 

Id. (quoting Bryant v. Compass Grp. USA, Inc., 958 F.3d 617, 

624 (7th Cir. 2020)). Debt-related information, by contrast, “is 

far less identifying,” id. at 1155 n.2, so the harm from its 

disclosure is not comparable. 

The Court’s analysis in TransUnion itself bolsters our

conclusion. That case involved two large subclasses of 

plaintiffs in a suit for violation of the Fair Credit Reporting 

Act (“FCRA”). Both subclasses claimed that TransUnion’s 

internal credit-report files contained misleading information 

about them—specifically, alerts on their credit reports 

indicating that their names matched those on a Treasury 

Department list of “specially designated nationals” considered to be national security threats. 141 S. Ct. at 2201. One 

subclass included those whose credit reports had been 

disseminated to potential creditors; the other included those 

whose credit reports were never shared with anyone outside 

TransUnion. Id. at 2201–02. 
12 No. 22-1202 

For the first subclass of plaintiffs, the Court held that 

their reputational harm from the disclosure of their misleading credit reports bore a close relationship to the harm 

caused by the tort of defamation. Id. at 2209. Although the 

information that TransUnion had disseminated was “only 

misleading and not literally false” (as the common law 

traditionally requires), the reputational “harm from being 

labeled a ‘potential terrorist’” sufficiently resembled the harm 

“from being labeled a ‘terrorist.’” Id. (emphasis added). So 

the first group had “suffered a concrete injury under 

Article III.” Id.

But for the remaining plaintiffs—those whose credit reports had not been disseminated—the Court held that they 

had not suffered a concrete injury. “Publication is essential 

to liability in a suit for defamation.” Id. (quotation marks 

omitted). The mere existence or retention of false or misleading information in a database has never been recognized as 

an actionable tort. Id. This is so because the basis of a defamation action is “the loss of credit or fame, and not the 

insult.” Id. (quoting J. BAKER, AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH 

LEGAL HISTORY 474 (5th ed. 2019)). So “the plaintiffs’ harm 

[wa]s roughly the same, legally speaking, as if someone 

wrote a defamatory letter and then stored it in her desk 

drawer.” Id. at 2210. Without disclosure, the letter “does not 

harm anyone, no matter how insulting [it] is.” Id. 

Nabozny’s case is comparable to this second subclass of 

plaintiffs in TransUnion. Public disclosure is the gravamen of 

the tort of giving publicity to another’s private life. But the 

harm Nabozny claims to have suffered from the alleged 

§ 1692c(b) violation is not remotely analogous to the harm 
No. 22-1202 13 

caused by the tortious public dissemination of sensitive facts 

about another’s private life. 

Another aspect of TransUnion supports our decision here. 

In dicta the Supreme Court doubted whether the common 

law had traditionally recognized as “actionable publications” disclosures to “vendors that print[] and sen[d] ... 

mailings.” TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2210 n.6. Although the 

Court made this observation in analogizing the harm from 

the alleged FCRA violations to the tort of defamation, its 

logic extends to this appeal. The “publication” element in a 

defamation claim includes disclosure to just one person, 

while the “publicity” element of the privacy tort at issue 

here requires disclosure to many. RESTATEMENT § 652D 

cmt. a. If a disclosure to a mail vendor is not “a publication” 

for defamation purposes, it also cannot be “publicity” for 

purposes of the tort of giving publicity to another’s private 

life.

TransUnion emphatically reminded us that “under 

Article III, an injury in law is not an injury in fact.” 141 S. Ct. 

at 2205. As both Spokeo and TransUnion make clear, 

Congress’s enactment of statutory obligations and a private 

cause of action for violations does not displace or dilute

Article III limitations on our jurisdiction. “A regime where 

Congress could freely authorize unharmed plaintiffs to sue 

defendants who violate federal law not only would violate 

Article III but also would infringe on the Executive Branch’s 

Article II authority.” TransUnion, 141 S. Ct. at 2207. Among

other concerns, “[p]rivate plaintiffs are not accountable to 

the people and are not charged with pursuing the public 

interest in enforcing a defendant’s general compliance with 

regulatory law.” Id. (citing Lujan, 504 U.S. at 577). To enforce 
14 No. 22-1202 

the separation-of-powers boundaries in our constitutional 

structure, “[o]nly those plaintiffs who have been concretely 

harmed by a defendant’s statutory violation may sue that 

private defendant over that violation in federal court.” Id. at 

2205. 

Because Nabozny suffered no concrete injury from the 

FDCPA violation she alleges here, she lacks standing to sue. 

The judge was right to dismiss her suit. 

AFFIRMED