Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass

When Google offered me the job of Director of Android Platform Security in 2017, it was impossible to refuse. Yes, Trump was already president—my family and I had qualms—but he seemed contained, even ineffective. More importantly, Google was a different company 9 years ago. Android was open source first and had just surpassed 2 billion users. I’d been studying its security from the outside since 2009, and it was (and still is!) the most exciting end-user facing operating system to work on. However, while the source code was always public, getting direct contact to the internal Android team had been incredibly difficult; trying to discuss new ideas for security mitigations or architectures supporting upcoming fields like mobile digital ID was a frustrating exercise for academics and industry researchers outside Google.