[PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals For the Eleventh Circuit

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No. 19-14434 ____________________ RICHARD HUNSTEIN, Plaintiff-Appellant, versus PREFERRED COLLECTION AND MANAGEMENT SERVICES, INC., Defendant-Appellee.

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 8:19-cv-00983-TPB-TGW ____________________ USCA11 Case: 19-14434 Date Filed: 09/08/2022 Page: 2 of 80

2 Opinion of the Court 19-14434 Before WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, WILSON, JORDAN, ROSENBAUM, JILL PRYOR, NEWSOM, BRANCH, GRANT, LUCK, LAGOA, BRASHER, and TJOFLAT, * Circuit Judges. GRANT, Circuit Judge, delivered the opinion of the Court, in which WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, WILSON, BRANCH, LUCK, LAGOA, BRASHER, and TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges, joined. WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, filed a concurring opinion, in which TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge, joined. NEWSOM, Circuit Judge, filed a dissenting opinion, in which JORDAN, ROSENBAUM, and JILL PRYOR, Circuit Judges, joined. GRANT, Circuit Judge: In opinion after opinion, one standing issue continues to arise—what it takes to show concrete harm. That question was once tricky. But for this case and others like it, where the plaintiff alleges no harm besides the violation of a statute, the Supreme Court has cut a straightforward path. Like it or not, that path is ours to follow. We have done so before. We recently held, en banc, that pleading a bare procedural violation of a statute was not enough, at least on its own, to establish concrete injury. And in that same case, we followed the Supreme Court’s direction to consider

* Senior Circuit Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat elected to participate in this decision pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 46(c). USCA11 Case: 19-14434 Date Filed: 09/08/2022 Page: 3 of 80

19-14434 Opinion of the Court 3 common-law torts as sources of information on whether a statutory violation had caused a concrete harm. The comparison shed helpful light there; because two tort elements were missing from the statutory violation, no similar harm could be inferred between the two. The Supreme Court has since ratified our approach. In TransUnion, the Court reiterated that harm from a statutory violation had to be “real” in order to be concrete, and that one way to tell if a harm is real is to compare it to a harm redressed in a traditional common-law tort. The Court also used the same approach that we did—comparing the elements—to determine whether the harm caused by a new statutory violation was similar to the one invoked by an old tort claim. When viewed as a way to evaluate whether actual harm occurred, this approach makes sense—if the elements do not match up, how could the harm that results from those elements? Here, we walk that same path again. The plaintiff alleges that a creditor sent information about his debt to a mail vendor, which then sent him a letter on behalf of the creditor reminding him of the terms of the debt. Though he identified no specific harm in his complaint, he now claims that the debt collector’s act caused him a concrete injury because it was analogous to the common- law tort of public disclosure. The problem with this theory is that his alleged reputational injury lacks a necessary element of the comparator tort—the requirement that the disclosure be public. USCA11 Case: 19-14434 Date Filed: 09/08/2022 Page: 4 of 80

4 Opinion of the Court 19-14434 Without publicity, a disclosu