Facebook’s latest public controversy appears to have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from the New York Times, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, the New York Times reports.
Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. The term that generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the Cambridge Analytica situation involves a since deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.
I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2018
Stamos, who joined the company in June of 2015 after spending nearly year and a half time wrestling with privacy woes at Yahoo, is generally well respected within the security community. His presence at Facebook — and his at times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes too.
