An appeals court affirmed approval of a settlement over Facebook's scanning of private messages while also pushing back against the social media giant's assertions that the class lacks standing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that users, who claimed Facebook probed their private messages to catalog URLs shared within the chats, got a fair shake in the 2017 no-cash deal, and rejected the objections of Anna St. John and her colleagues at the Center for Class Action Fairness that users received only "worthless injunctive relief." With damages claims already booted from the case at the time of the settlement, the panel noted that the class only had injunctive or declaratory avenues for relief.

"Here, the class did not need to receive much for the settlement to be fair because the class gave up very little," wrote Judge Michelle Friedland, on behalf of Judges John Clifford Wallace and Richard Clifton. "The district court did not err to the extent it concluded that class members' claims were weak enough that the class was fairly likely to end up receiving nothing at all had this litigation proceeded further."

Yet, the court clarified that Facebook's actions constituted a concrete injury under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Invasion of Privacy Act. In its appellate supplemental brief, Facebook argued the plaintiffs lacked standing because they "suffered no concrete harm from the 'use of anonymized and aggregated data from website links,'" according to the opinion. But the judges ruled Facebook's standing argument is besides the point.

"Plaintiffs alleged, and Facebook has confirmed (through, among other things, its revised Data Policy), that Facebook identifies and collects the contents of users' individual private messages," Friedland wrote. "Plaintiffs' position that this was being done without consent meant that they claimed a violation of the concrete privacy interests that ECPA and CIPA protect, regardless of how the collected data was later used. No more is needed to support standing under Spokeo."

Facebook's attorneys at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

The court also noted that the Illinois biometrics privacy case Patel v. Facebook and several other cases have identified statutory provisions that protect consumers' concrete privacy interests.

"We respect the legislatures' judgment about the importance of the privacy interests violated when communications are intercepted, as reflected in their decisions to enact a private right of action that is available when these provisions are infringed," Friedland wrote.

Alan Butler, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which submitted an amicus brief in the case, said that the Ninth Circuit continued a trend of courts affirming consumers have standing to sue over privacy violations. "I think the Ninth Circuit's decision on standing is really good and encouraging for consumers," Butler said.

The Center for Class Action Fairness' Ted Frank and Adam Schulman backed St. John's objection.

Frank said in an email that the insubstantial injunctive relief, red flags and self-dealing recognized by the court in the opinion "is exactly the sort of settlement the Ninth Circuit has previously recognized as impermissible to approve, even when attorneys were making much less than the millions they took here to waive the class claims." He said his team is evaluating their options.

Plaintiffs attorneys from Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Carney Bates & Pulliam in Little Rock, Arkansas, did not return a request for comment.