Facebook can't invade users' privacy 'because there is no privacy,' its lawyer argues

Mark Zuckerberg says the Facebook of the future will be "private." But the Facebook of right now? It's apparently not at all.

The social media site is currently facing a class action lawsuit in a U.S. District Court surrounding its Cambridge Analytica scandal, during which litigants claim Facebook violated their rights to privacy. Facebook has already owned up to letting user data slip, but as its counsel argued in a Wednesday hearing, that doesn't matter because there is "no expectation of privacy" on the site anyway, Law360 reports.

Political data firm Cambridge Analytica got access to millions of users' private Facebook information and used it for President Trump's 2016 election campaign, prompting the 2018 suit. But in Facebook's attempt to get that case dismissed on Wednesday, it argued that "those users had consented to sharing their information" all along, Law360 writes. "You have to closely guard something to have a reasonable expectation of privacy," but the whole point of Facebook is to share information, Facebook counsel Orin Snyder said. "There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy," he continued.

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That assertion flies in the face of what Facebook's CEO said in March: That he wants to create a "privacy-focused communications platform" that looks like a combination of Facebook and WhatsApp. It's also completely at odds with the dozens of apologies Facebook has doled out as private user data gets leaked again and again.