The federal judge overseeing the consumer privacy litigation filed against Facebook Inc. in the wake of the company's Cambridge Analytica scandal seems poised to allow at least a portion of the lawsuit to survive.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California on Wednesday heard arguments on the company's motion to dismiss the mulitidistrict litigation and suggested that Facebook's lawyers were wrong to suggest that plaintiffs hold no privacy interest in information shared via social media.

Representing Facebook, Orin Snyder of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher suggested that if a person brought together 100 friends in a room and shared information with them, there would no longer be any privacy interest in that information. “If you don't hold something private, it's not private,” said Snyder, suggesting that a Facebook user would be in a similar position as the person in the room.

Chhabria, however, pushed back against the notion that information shared via social media is devoid of privacy interest.

“If I share [something] with 10 people that doesn't eliminate my expectation of privacy,” said Chhabria “It might diminish it, but it doesn't eliminate it.”

Chhabria also noted that Snyder's argument at times ran counter to pronouncements that Facebook leaders have made before regulators and to the public of late about the importance of user privacy. “What you are saying now sounds contrary to the message that Facebook itself disseminates about privacy,” the judge told Snyder.

Later in the hearing, plaintiffs co-lead counsel Derek Loeser of Keller Rohrback echoed that sentiment.

“I think we all should have a lot of concern and take pause when Mr. Synder says that there is no expectation of privacy when a person uses Facebook,” said Loeser, who is representing the plaintiffs alongside Lesley Weaver of Bleichmar Fonti & Auld.

Facebook was hit with lawsuits alleging that the company violated consumer fraud and privacy laws by allowing third parties to access user data without consent or in ways previously undisclosed by the company. The multidistrict litigation was consolidated before Chhabria in June 2018 after revelations that the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica data analytics firm used data from 87 million Facebook users to develop targeted political ads.

Facebook has conceded Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information about users through a Facebook app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” created by developer Aleksandr Kogan. The social media company contends that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica violated Facebook's internal policies.

Arguing Wednesday for Facebook, Snyder cautioned that “It's not up to the federal district court to invent new privacy rights.” He said that the company made a “multiplicity of disclosures to users” that they could control who had access to information shared via their Facebook profiles via the site's privacy and app settings. Snyder argued that any reasonable Facebook user would have known that third-party app developers could get access to certain information about them via their friends' Facebook activity through reviewing the company's disclosures.

“Users had the absolute right to control who saw what,” Snyder said. “To the extent that Facebook made that privacy declaration, Facebook scrupulously followed it.”

Chhabria said that he tended to agree with Snyder's interpretation of the Facebook disclosures, but pointed out that he was reading them with the benefit of hindsight as someone who has been following developments in the media in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica news. Chhabria said that he likely needed to look at the disclosure language through the eyes of a Facebook consumer in 2012. “Am I really in a position at this point to conclude from all these worlds that the FB user who signed up in 2012 could only interpret this language in the way you're suggesting?” asked Chhabria, noting that the suit was only at the motion to dismiss stage.

The judge took the matter under the submission without indicating when he would rule.