With lawsuits pending and security taking center stage, Uber has hired Facebook's former Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan to be its own first-ever CSO.
Acknowledging Uber's explosive growth—to 300 cities in 56 countries—and saying that the car service has “become a critical part of the infrastructure of cities,” company CEO Travis Kalanack in a blog post called Sullivan the “right individual to oversee [the company's] global cybersecurity and safety efforts.”
Sullivan, who spent five years securing Facebook and worked at both eBay and PayPal before that, joins a team at Uber that includes Managing Counsel of Data Privacy Katherine Tassi and Head of Global Safety Phil Cardenas. In the same blog post, Sullivan, who also worked at the Justice Department earlier in his career, said he hoped to bring the best practices learned at eBay and Facebook, which grew rapidly under his tenure, to bear at Uber, while “bridging the divide between the digital and physical worlds.”
