The Massachusetts attorney general is pressing Facebook to release more information, including the names of the tens of thousands of apps flagged during Facebook’s internal investigation into data sharing practices, as well as the names of the developers who built those apps. In an October filing, lawyers for Facebook argued that the request was too broad and violated the company’s right to communicate privately with its lawyers. A district judge is set to hear arguments in that case on Thursday.

Other court fights have revealed some of the company’s inner workings. In 2017, Mr. Zuckerberg testified in an intellectual property trial involving Oculus, a virtual reality company Facebook had acquired, and spoke openly about Facebook’s approach to acquisitions. Documents related to another lawsuit filed by a software developer have leaked in recent years, providing an inside look at how Facebook treated third-party applications. New documents related to the case were published Wednesday by news outlets including NBC News.

California’s investigation began in the spring of 2018, with investigators looking at Facebook’s sharing of information with Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Becerra said . It has since expanded to include Facebook’s sharing of data to third-party apps, its disclosures to users and its use of privacy settings .

Mr. Becerra said that the company had dragged its feet with responses to a first set of inquiries, and that the company later refused to supply documents and answers to many other questions as the investigation progressed. The state had requested emails and other communications involving Mr. Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, and Ms. Sandberg, its chief operating officer, about the company’s priva cy practices. The company rejected requests to search the executives’ emails, according to the court filing.

“Thus, Facebook is not just continuing to drag its feet in response to the attorney general’s investigation, it is failing to comply with lawfully issued subpoenas and interrogatories,” the lawsuit said.

California has taken a lead role in policing large tech companies like Facebook — many of which are based in the state. The state's new privacy law will go into effect next year, making Mr. Becerra one of the top privacy enforcers in the United States given the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law. His office proposed draft rules last month to advance the data rights that consumers receive under the law, the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Mr. Becerra, who became the attorney general in 2017 after a long tenure in Congress, has been publicly critical about the country’s biggest tech companies. But he has not publicly joined the dozens of other state attorneys general investigating the market power of Facebook and tech giants. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, is leading a multistate antitrust inquiry into Facebook, while Texas helms an investigation into Google.