Uber spent most of 2014 battling through various government lawsuits alongside trying to tame its executives from saying anything out of order. In-between the bans and bad PR, it's also been fighting against a breach of its customer database.

Earlier this month, Uber decided a new chief security officer would be a smart measure to stop the security breaches and blackmarket sale of Uber accounts, which is why it poached Facebook's ex-CSO Joe Sullivan.

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Sullivan has an impressive portfolio, with eight years of the U.S. Justice Department for cybercrime alongside a few years at eBay, PayPal and Facebook as head of security.

It follows overwhelming growth in the taxi industry from Uber, putting the company's valuation at $40 billion. That is almost as high as Salesforce and higher than companies like Tesla Motors and Netflix already on the New York Stock Exchange.

"It's no longer about traditional metrics for safe transportation or keeping our community's data private and secure, but about how we lead efforts to redefine and strengthen physical and data security in the location-based world," said Travis Kalanick in the blog post Thursday.

"We see opportunities ahead not just in technology, through biometrics and driver monitoring, but in the potential for inspiring collaborations with city and state governments around the world."

Kalanick is also looking into driverless cars for Uber, allowing potentially more cuts to the price of a taxi. This might upset the taxi community it has built up over the past few years but given Uber's domination in places like San Francisco and New York, some cab drivers don't have a choice any more.

Uber still needs to keep a lid on executives making stupid comments but this is starting to become less of an issue as Kalanick starts working on building a stronger management team.

There are still issues in countries like China, South Korea and India where Uber has a poor reputation or is outright banned from existence. The taxi company needs to start investing more time into learning the culture of these regions and working compromises to allow them service inside the country.

TagsUber, Joe Sullivan, taxi service