Google’s former security chief is retiring from the company

Google’s former security chief, Eric Grosse, confirmed today that he is retiring from a roughly decade-long career with the company.

Grosse, 63, joined Google’s security team in 2007. He retired from his role managing Google’s security engineers in 2015 and was succeeded in his role by Gerhard Eschelbeck.

For the past two years, Grosse has remained at Google working on research related to security, according to the company.

Grosse led Google’s security efforts when Edward Snowden revealed the NSA was covertly surveilling U.S. citizens, which included exploiting vulnerabilities of tech companies to obtain user data.

When he was head of Google’s security, he said he was willing to help the government with cyber security defense efforts, but not with intercepting signals, according to a 2014 New York Times story

“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he told the Times.

Grosse oversaw the release in 2012 of a security alert to notify users of possible state-sponsored attacks.

“We believe it is our duty to be proactive in notifying users about attacks or potential attacks so that they can take action to protect their information,” Grosse wrote in a blog post announcing the new category of warning.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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