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Imagine being an engineer at Apple, one of the most coveted positions in technology. In addition, you work in the ultra-secret autonomous car division. And you blow while leaving for a start-up in China and stealing Apple's trade secrets on the way out the door. That's what authorities believe that a man did last weekend, and now he has been slapped with federal charges.
According to the Mercury News, Xiaolang Zhang was charged on Monday in the US District Court of Northern California. He is accused of attempting to transfer Apple's trade secrets to his new employer, XMotors, a Chinese start-up that works on electric and driverless vehicles. Zhang was arrested on Saturday while he was trying to board a plane for Beijing
. Apart from the business plot here, Zhang's case is notable because Apple does not really talk about what it does with driverless cars. At this point, he could just work on an operating system for cars rather than a full driverless car – who knows? Apparently, Zhang knows it.
The criminal complaint does not appear to be online yet, but Mercury News reports that she alleges that Zhang started at Apple in 2015 as a hardware engineer and that she was "granted" wide access to confidential internal databases ". He went on paternity leave in April and, upon his return, he would have informed the senior that he was returning to China to take care of his sick mother. But he told his supervisor that he would join XMotors. After returning the phones and the laptop to his company, Apple would have reviewed its download activity and found that it was collecting confidential data at a suspicious rate.
Zhang also allegedly confessed to Apple that he had entered the software and hardware labs he was supposed to be on paternity leave and he transferred confidential documents to his wife's computer. When questioned by investigators on June 27, he confessed to taking documents from Apple, according to Mercury News.
XMotors is relatively unknown. He claims to have raised funds from Alibaba, Foxconn and IDG Capital. He exhibited an electric vehicle at CES this year which was to go on sale last spring, but he seems to have missed this launch date. The company's website is just a homepage with the slogan, "Imminent Singularity."
We asked Apple for the comment on the case, but did not receive an immediate response. A spokesman told Mercury News: "We are working with the authorities on this issue and will do everything we can to ensure that this person and other people involved are held accountable for their actions." The statement n & # 39, did not include the words "driverless car".
[Mercury News via VentureBeat]
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