Meta hires chief information security officer for the first time

Meta has appointed a chief information security officer for the first time in its history. Guy Rosen previously worked for the controversial VPN service Onavo and will now oversee the security of user accounts and the company.

Guy Rosen confirms on Twitter that he takes on the role of ciso. A chief information security officer is concerned with information security within a company. It is the first time that Meta or Facebook, which has 2.9 billion active users, has hired such a person. The previous person in charge of security, chief security officer Alex Stamos, left Facebook in 2018 after he had frequent disagreements with the company’s top executives over, among other things, how to tackle fake news on the platform.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes in a memo that Reuters has seen, that the role of ciso is intended to ‘take a new step in the security work that is in our DNA’. Rosen says on Twitter that he will “monitor the entire breadth of security risks from users of our service, our company and the industry.”

Previously, Rosen was Facebook’s “vice president of integrity.” He was not entirely undisputed. Guy Rosen joined Facebook in 2013 after Facebook acquired its start-up Onavo. That was a free VPN service that Facebook used to collect competition data. Users could use the VPN, but Facebook could use it to see which other applications users started. For example, the company learned that the number of Snapchat users was falling before it wanted to make a takeover offer. The company stopped the app in 2019 after a lot of criticism.