Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos, is leaving the company at the end of the month. And surprisingly, no one will be replacing him, and Facebook has no plans to find someone to take over the position. That’s a pretty big deal, especially after the last six months. Facebook has been dealing with foreign powers attempting to meddle in the mid-term elections that are coming up in November, not to mention the meddling in the 2016 Presidential Election and all of the data that Cambridge Analytica was able to farm from the network. If there were ever a time to be without a security chief, now would not be the time.
After all of the security issues that Facebook has faced in the past few months, many companies would be beefing up its security team. However, Facebook is doing the opposite. It is getting rid of it, and moving security engineers into other divisions. Facebook believes that this is a better idea, as it can “better address the emerging security threats we face”, since they are part of the different teams at Facebook. But a dedicated security team would likely work out better for Facebook. The social media company did note in a statement that it will “continue to evaluate what kind of structure works best.”
Stamos has been with Facebook since 2015, after he had worked at Yahoo in a similar role. Though after seeing all of the security breaches that Yahoo has gone through in the past decade – that came to light after Verizon was looking to buy the company – that may not be something he wants to keep on his resume. Stamos will be around at Facebook about another two weeks, and end on August 17. After he leaves the company, he’ll be teaching and conducting research at Stanford, so he won’t be too far from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park.