A U.S. judge ordered Facebook Inc to give shareholders emails and other records concerning how the social media company handles data privacy after the company’s lawyers argued users ‘have no expectation of privacy.’
In a 57-page decision on Thursday, which followed a one-day trial in March, Vice Chancellor Joseph Slights of the Delaware Chancery Court said shareholders demonstrated a ‘credible basis’ to believe Facebook board members may have committed wrongdoing related to data privacy breaches.
The ruling comes despite contention from Facebook’s attorney, Orin Snyder, that users have no legal right to privacy, as reported by Law360.
‘There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,’ Snyder said, according to the outlet.
The decision relates to a massive data breach in which 87 million users were compromised by the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge.
Slights noted that Facebook had at the time of the 2015 Cambridge Analytica breach been subject to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission consent decree that required it to bolster its data security measures.
The breach was not revealed until March 2018.
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