Uber appoints Matt Olsen, former general counsel for the NSA, as its CSO, replacing Joe Sullivan, who left last year amid controversial handling of data breach
Last November, Uber's new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, penned an apologetic note to riders and drivers explaining … Tweets: @dkhos Tweets: Dara Khosrowshahi / @dkhos : Thrilled to have Matt Olsen on board as #Uber Chief Trust and Security Officer. He has more than earned the respect of our team at all levels while working with us over the last few months - http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber's security chair has been empty since Dara Khosrowshahi, installed as CEO in August 2017, fired Joe Sullivan over the concealed 2016 breach — a role Sullivan had held since Uber lured him from Facebook in 2015 as its first CSO. Sullivan resurfaced quickly, taking the top security job at Cloudflare in May 2018.
The replacement matters because of the title and the résumé: Matt Olsen arrives not as CSO but as Chief Trust and Security Officer, carrying NSA general counsel credentials. With Khosrowshahi still apologizing to riders and drivers and an IPO on the horizon, Uber is buying government-grade credibility rather than another Silicon Valley security operator.
First-order effects
- Uber gains a security chief whose intelligence-community background is aimed squarely at rebuilding confidence with riders, drivers, and the FTC regulators the breach concealment antagonized.
- Joe Sullivan's move to Cloudflare means two major platforms now run security under executives shaped by the same breach saga — one hired to restore trust, one hired despite having lost it.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms facing their own trust deficits now have a template to copy: recruiting ex-national-security officials into expanded 'trust and security' titles as a visible signal of reform.
- Boards vetting security executives will weight disclosure judgment alongside technical chops, since Sullivan's firing showed that how a breach is handled — not just the breach itself — ends careers.
Third-order effects
- The CSO role is splitting into a trust-and-safety function accountable to regulators and the public, with personal exposure for executives who conceal incidents — a structure that favors government veterans over pure product-security operators.
- If the pattern holds, breach-response conduct becomes a standing executive-liability issue across the industry, pushing companies toward outside counsel and formalized disclosure protocols before any incident occurs.
The trend: Consumer platforms emerging from scandal are converting security leadership into trust-and-security roles staffed by national-security veterans, as regulatory scrutiny and public-market timelines raise the cost of concealment.