New age car service Uber on Thursday said that it has hired former Facebook security chief Joe Sullivan as its first ever Chief Security Officer.
Sullivan, who will take the position as CSO at Uber in late April, joins the company after 5 years at Facebook in a similar role, and nearly 7 years at eBay and PayPal prior to that.
Sullivan also spent 8 years with the Department of Justice prosecuting cybercrime.
“I look forward to bringing the best practices that I’ve learned along the way to Uber and doing defining work in bridging the divide between the digital and physical worlds,” Sullivan said in a statement. “There’s a great foundation of safety already in place; my goal is to make it even stronger.”
“This is a chance to help build the culture of a young and growing organization, and to continue building upon the safety and security initiatives that are the backbone of Uber’s success,” Sullivan continued.
The appointment of Sullivan as CSO comes just weeks after the company disclosed that a data breach may have allowed malicious actors to gain access to the driver’s license numbers of roughly 50,000 of its drivers. On Feb. 27, Uber said that it had identified a “one-time access of an Uber database” by an unauthorized third party in May 2014.
Sullivan is a graduate of Providence College and holds a J.D. in Law from the University of Miami School of Law.
According to Sullivan’s LinkedIn profile, he also is a Trust and Safety Advisory Board member at AirBnB.
“In searching for a thought leader to help Uber redefine safety and data security, we couldn’t ask for someone better than Joe Sullivan,” Uber’s Travis Kalanick wrote in a blog post.