People-search and data-broker websites sell "background reports" assembled from scraped court records — often error-ridden, often matched by name alone. When sued under the FCRA, several of them raised a bold defense: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content. In Henderson v. The Source for Public Data, L.P., 53 F.4th 110 (4th Cir. 2022), the Fourth Circuit — the federal appeals court whose decisions bind Maryland — shut that door.
The case
The plaintiffs alleged Public Data's reports attributed inaccurate criminal records to them and that the company ignored core FCRA duties that attach to consumer reporting agencies, including the employment-report protections of § 1681k. The district court dismissed, holding Section 230 immunized the entire operation. The Fourth Circuit reversed.
The reasoning
The court explained that Section 230's shield is narrow:
"Protection under § 230(c)(1) extends only to bar certain claims imposing liability for specific information that another party provided."
Many FCRA duties — following reasonable procedures, providing file disclosures, sending § 1681k notices — regulate a company's own conduct, not its role as a "publisher" of someone else's content. And where Public Data itself parsed, summarized, and packaged the records into its reports, it was an information content provider in its own right:
"Counts Two and Four are not barred because Public Data is itself an information content provider for the information relevant to those counts."
Why this decision matters
Henderson is one of the most important background-screening decisions in the country, and it is our circuit's law. It means the FCRA reaches the modern data-broker ecosystem: if a company assembles and sells reports about consumers for employment, housing, or credit decisions, it generally must comply with the FCRA — accuracy procedures, disclosures, dispute rights, and all — no matter how "techy" its business model looks. If an online background report is spreading someone else's criminal record under your name, that is exactly the kind of case this decision preserves. Federal court is available, and the statute makes the defendant pay the fees.