Judge Vince Chhabria, Northern District of California

Facebook Inc. lost its bid to appeal a judge's ruling in a class action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but the social media site is moving forward on bringing a separate privacy case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California refused to grant Facebook's request to file an interlocutory appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Facebook is challenging the judge's Sept. 9 ruling refusing to dismiss the consolidated complaint in the multidistrict litigation.

Chhabria's denial comes one day after the Ninth Circuit granted Facebook's request to stay its mandate in a separate class action brought over its facial recognition technology. The Ninth Circuit stayed its mandate, of an Aug. 8 ruling upholding class certification, in order to give Facebook time to petition the U.S. Supreme Court.

Neither a Facebook spokesman nor its attorney in the Cambridge Analytica case, Orin Snyder, a New York partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, responded to requests for comment. Lesley Weaver, of Oakland's Bleichmar Fonti & Auld, who is co-lead plaintiffs' counsel in the Cambridge Analytica case, declined to comment.

In both cases, Facebook has challenged plaintiffs' claims that its actions caused them injuries simply by violating their privacy—a key class action issue many defendants have asked the Supreme Court to address. The ruling also comes as Facebook has increasingly faced pressure over alleged privacy violations. In July, for instance, the Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5 billion fine against Facebook over their reporting practices related to consumer privacy violations.

"The question whether alleged data privacy violations give rise to Article III standing is an evolving issue of increasing importance that already has drawn considerable attention from the nation's appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court," wrote Facebook's lawyers in their petition for interlocutory appeal. They cited the Supreme Court's March 20 decision remanding a class action against Google Inc. to address standing.

In the Cambridge Analytica case, Chhabria found that Facebook's' users had suffered injuries.

"To say that a 'mere' privacy invasion is not capable of inflicting an 'actual injury' serious enough to warrant the attention of the federal courts is to disregard the importance of privacy in our society, not to mention the historic role of the federal judiciary in protecting it," Chhabria wrote.

That's especially true in this case, wrote plaintiffs' attorneys in their Oct. 22 opposition to Facebook's interlocutory appeal.

"Facebook collected a trove of content and information that users had expressly designated as private—including private messages, personal photographs, videos, and posts about sensitive subjects that users intended to share only with friends or even more limited audiences—and distributed it to thousands of businesses for them to use and analyze," they wrote.

On Wednesday, Facebook filed a notice in the Cambridge Analytica case of the Ninth Circuit's order granting its stay in the facial recognition class action, which alleged that its feature called "Tag Suggestions" violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. That case addressed the strictest law in the nation protecting biometric data, which includes fingerprints and iris scans. The Illinois law requires companies to obtain a written release to collect someone's biometric data, which they must destroy after a specific period of retention.

In that case, the Ninth Circuit granted a request from Facebook, represented by Mayer Brown's Lauren Goldman, to bring an interlocutory appeal of U.S. District Judge James Donato's 2018 ruling approving class certification.

After the Ninth Circuit affirmed, five groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Washington Legal Foundation, filed amicus briefs supporting Facebook's petition for rehearing en banc. The Ninth Circuit denied rehearing Oct. 18.

In seeking a stay of that mandate, Facebook said its Supreme Court petition would raise several "substantial questions," including Article III standing.

"Given this clear split with multiple court of appeals on an important question of Article III standing, there is a substantial chance that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari on this issue," Goldman wrote.

The Ninth Circuit granted the stay until Jan. 16.