We take our privacy for granted. We don't deserve it

When I began university in early 2010, one of my units was a class called "writing for communication". The unit's lecturer was a man who looked as if he had just finished his communications degree, but the content of the lectures suggested he was probably more interested in philosophy than anything else. A recurring theme of class discussions would eventually revert to what some would call a paranoid outlook on the future – the end of privacy and the downfall of humanity via social media, as well as references to Orwell's 1984 sporadically littered through hurried rhetoric.

Admittedly, this lecture was one of the few I actually listened to. Much like my student peers at 5pm on a Friday afternoon, I was too invested in what was going on in my friends' lives on Facebook and checking out the newest photos from a random girl I had just met in the courtyard and fallen in love with - a different one from last week.

"Social media is a cycle – if Facebook is the king, it will surely fall," are only some of the words I remember, but the only ones that have really been resonating with me recently.

Have we been witnessing this lately? Facebook's Hamlet-esque moment? The social media giant has killed the public's privacy, and now the public want their revenge.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress two weeks ago and made the shocking revelation that even his own private data had been compromised and sold to Donald Trump's presidential campaign associate Cambridge Analytica, along with an estimated 87 million people worldwide, 310,000 of those being ordinary Australians. It had never been more clear that the company's mission statement of "connecting the world" was doing more to divide it than ever. It has become obvious that Facebook has lost control over its data-retention methods.

But how many people have you spoken to since the drama unfolded who have sworn off the site forever? More than likely, none. Ignorance certainly is bliss, isn't it?

How has the world's most successful social media outlet of all time, originally starting as a harmless Harvard joke, even got itself in this position? You only have to look at its appalling default privacy settings, as well as the increasing number of highly targeted advertisements appealing to a millennial market who would sacrifice their personal privacy for Instagram likes from hash-tagging their favourite brands. But is it Facebook's fault? Debatable, but here's something which definitely is.

My father Brad, a peculiarly curious man, was listening to the Facebook data scandal unfold through Zuckerberg awkwardly stumbling through questions from US senators on live television, when he decided to download his own Facebook data. What he found next in a folder titled "messages" was ultimately concerning – a man with the same name as him, living in Queensland, a far stretch from our family suburban home in Sydney's south-west, typing in a lengthy Facebook Messenger group chat to people my father has never had any association with. A man named Glen is attempting to sort out jackets for the group for some sort of stage performance.