Uber is increasing the size of its security team four-fold
Taxi app company Uber hopes to have increased the size of its security team from 25 people to 100 people by the end of the year, according to the FT.
The change comes as the firm, which is worth an estimated $50bn (£32bn), faces an increasing number of security threats related to data privacy, hacking and the safety of its employees.
Around the world, taxi drivers are battling against Uber and its dominance of the market. Earlier this year, an anonymous hacker managed to access the personal details of 50,000 Uber drivers.
According to the Joe Sullivan, the company's chief security officer, employees may need to be protected because they could be “polarising figures in their communities”.
In terms of securing data, Sullivan said the company was working on finding out who had access to customer data, why they had access and how long the information would be available to them.
Every company is a data company now, no one can be unsophisticated. The challenge is half the company needs access to customer data some of the time — it is not just customer support, it is marketing, engineers as they iterate, communications when they need to figure out what happened in an incident.