Meta Platforms has intensified its criticism of European Union antitrust regulators, arguing before the EU Court of Justice that investigators overstepped legal boundaries when demanding vast quantities of personal and sensitive documents during two probes launched four years ago.

In its appeal, the U.S. tech company questioned whether EU regulators have any meaningful limits on their investigative powers, after losing an earlier challenge at a lower tribunal. The dispute stems from two European Commission inquiries—one involving Facebook’s online classified ads service, Facebook Marketplace, and the other concerning the handling of user data.

Representing Meta, lawyer Daniel Jowell told a panel of five judges that the Commission’s document requests swept up deeply personal information that had no relevance to antitrust concerns. Among the materials captured, he said, were autopsy reports of family members, children’s school records, and confidential security details.

“These sorts of aberrant, intrusive and disproportionate requests should, in our respectful submission, never have been made,” Jowell argued, warning that granting such broad powers would undermine necessity, proportionality and basic privacy rights.

Meta contends that regulators compelled the company to produce nearly one million documents using roughly 2,500 search terms in the data investigation and about 600 in the Marketplace case—criteria the company claims amounted to a digital dragnet.

However, the European Commission rejected the characterization. Commission lawyer Giuseppe Conte said investigators largely relied on Meta’s own proposed search terms and insisted that the number of queries was in the hundreds, not thousands. According to Conte, requesting documents based on search-term filters is standard practice among competition authorities worldwide.

The EU Court of Justice is expected to deliver its ruling next year. The dispute comes against the backdrop of the Commission’s broader regulatory actions against Meta, including a €797.7 million fine imposed last year for allegedly tying Facebook Marketplace to Facebook’s social network and applying unfair trading conditions to rival platforms.

The appeals currently before the Court are Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission (Facebook Marketplace) C-496/23 P and Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission (Facebook Data) C-497/23 P.