Obsidian Security Appoints Data Ethicist Laura Norén as Vice President of Privacy & Trust

Obsidian Security, a cybersecurity company providing intelligent
identity protection for hybrid enterprises, announced today the
appointment of Laura Norén as Vice President of Privacy and Trust.
Previously serving as the Director of Research, Norén brings a decade of
experience in the sociotechnical impact of technological advances,
including five years working on the ethical implications of applied data
science.

Obsidian is building its technical stack and organizational structure to
become a privacy and data ethics leader within the cybersecurity
industry. Establishing an executive-level role to protect data subjects’
privacy and advocate for fairness in statistical and machine learning
models is part of a larger effort to unite privacy principles and data
ethics with technical advances in identity-centric cybersecurity. As
Obsidian’s identity intelligence platform gains market traction, the
regulatory environment becomes more complex, and demands for responsible
data practices have captured the public attention, technically rigorous
privacy and identity governance is crucially important.

Norén’s new role at Obsidian is a proactive privacy and data ethics
position integrated into the data science and engineering teams, a first
in the cybersecurity industry. In a systematic sample of cybersecurity
companies exhibiting at RSA 2019, the US’s largest cybersecurity
conference by attendance, only 12% had roles dedicated to privacy or
ethics and most of those focused on compliance with limited influence on
early-stage product development and model fairness.

“At Obsidian, we believe data ethics is more than a compliance issue.
Because we are identity-centric and driven by machine learning we have
to take responsibility for impacts on customers and employees. Laura’s
statistical background and capacity to understand the human impact of
applied data science are a competitive advantage for us. She’s here to
look out for the interests of the employees and customers we protect,”
said Glenn Chisholm, CEO of Obsidian Security who added that Norén is
also the company’s general data protection officer for EU facing
customers.

Before joining Obsidian in 2018, Norén was a Moore-Sloan postdoctoral
associate at NYU’s Center for Data Science where she wrote and taught
the first Data Science Ethics course in the Department of Applied
Statistics. She maintains an active scholarly agenda and holds visiting
scholar appointments at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
and UC-Berkeley’s Division of Data Science. Norén serves as an advisor
to the Moore-Sloan Alumni Network and Project Lead the Way, a K-12 STEM
curriculum developer serving 3 million students. She is a frequent
speaker at data science conferences, corporate workshops, and an active
writer, including for her Data Science Community Newsletter. Norén holds
a PhD in sociology from NYU and undergraduate degrees from MIT.

About Obsidian Security

Obsidian is a leading provider of intelligent identity protection for
the hybrid enterprise. Obsidian enables organizations to secure
enterprise users by monitoring activity in order to detect, investigate
and fix weak identity hygiene, suspicious behavior, and policy
violations. At the core of Obsidian’s machine learning powered offering
is the industry’s first identity graph that maps an organization’s users
to the assets they have permissions for and how they have accessed these
assets. The company was founded by industry veterans from Cylance,
Carbon Black and the NSA. Obsidian is backed by Greylock Partners, Wing
and GV. For more information, please visit www.obsidiansecurity.com.

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