Zuckerberg says Facebook\'s future is \'privacy-focused\'

Mark Zuckerberg says he's putting privacy first In a major shift Wednesday Zuckerberg shared his plans for Facebook.

In a detailed blogpost titled "A privacy-focused vision for social networking", he wrote "I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever." Zuckerberg added: "I expect future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network." Facebook already is one of the biggest global players in private messaging.

It bought Whatsapp for $19 billion back in 2014- the service currently has over 1.5 billion users.

Its other standalone app, Messenger, has more than 1.3 billion users.

Zuckerberg added that while public social forums popularized by Facebook will remain - there was also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first..

The big push for privacy -comes as Facebook has earned a bad rep for mishandling user data and has faced backlash from lawmakers across the world.

Zuckerberg briefly acknowledged Facebook's flaws in Wednesday's note..

Saying "I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform " But, he added, "we've repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want."