Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security director, has announced that he will step down on August 17th. The company has indicated that it will not replace him.
“As an industry, it’s crucial that we take responsibility and consider the consequences of what we make, ” Stamos wrote in a public message on his Facebook page. I plan to continue working with Facebook’s security teams.”
Facebook told several media outlets that it does not plan to fill the vacancy left by Alex Stamos when he leaves. The company has been working since January to dissolve its security team to integrate these specialists directly into the various production sectors.
“The security challenges we face today are scattered over many surfaces, and multiple teams throughout the company need to focus on them,” Stamos wrote in an internal memo from New York Times .
After August 17, Alex Stamos will become associate professor at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he will teach cybersecurity. He will also incorporate a new research group called Information Warfare in which he will focus on warfare methods through information and misinformation. The group will try to recommend countermeasures against these warlike methods of the 21 th century.
A man of conviction
During his three years on Facebook, Mr. Stamos caught the eye for his many Twitter voices, in which he answered journalists’ questions about Facebook security. These public and spontaneous positions are unusual for employees and managers of the company.
Last March, the New York Times reported that Alex Stamos was in conflict with his employers over the handling of the Russian misinformation crisis on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential election.
According to the American daily, Stamos would have liked to leave the ship in December 2017, but Facebook would have convinced him to stay in office until August 2018.
If the New York Times information is accurate, it would be a second resignation for Alex Stamos. He reportedly left Yahoo in 2015 for similar reasons, as the company had worked with US intelligence to monitor users, according to Reuters .
The resignation of Alex Stamos comes as a new campaign of political manipulation was discovered by Facebook on its platform this week.
Stamos is the fourth Facebook executive to leave the company in a few months, after Colin Stretch (legal director), Elliot Schrage (director of communications and policy) and Jan Koum (co-founder of WhatsApp).
Brian Shannon is just getting his start a reporter. He attended a technical school while still in high school where he learned a variety of skills, from photography to car mechanics. Brian also helps keep Techno Secrets social media feeds up-to-date.
