Xiaolang Zhang who was Apple's engineer a few days ago, was arrested last Sunday while he was at San Francisco International Airport Jose in California. The FBI accused the former Cupertino employee of stealing secret information and even some pieces of equipment while he was working for the company.

Zhang was hired in 2015 and was immediately assigned to Project Titan Apple's initiative to build an autonomous driving system. The engineer designed and tested printed circuit boards used in the sensors of the aforementioned project. The complaint from the judicial body indicates that Zhang was absent in April this year to attend family affairs in China, especially at the birth of his son. After his return, he met some supervisors to inform them that he would abandon the Apple project to go to Xpeng (Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology), a Chinese startup supported by Alibaba that also works in the sector autonomous vehicles.

One of the supervisors noticed that Zhang was "evasive" at the last meeting, so Apple's security team decided to conduct an investigation to make sure that the activity of the employee was in order. After inquiring about Zhang's movements, it was discovered that shortly before leaving the company, his activity in the data network had grown exponentially. For the post he occupied, had access to a lot of information about the Titan Project all confidential.

copied information relating to prototypes, voltage requirements, battery system and brackets for the suspension. All this obtained from the large database to which I had access. Through surveillance cameras, we learn that Zhang left the campus of Apple with a box of hardware . Schedules coincided with the time when there was an increase in network activity

After the discovery, the security team had a meeting with the employee, where was accepted to have stolen information and material owned by Apple. He also admitted to having transferred some of this information to his partner's personal computer, which is about 40 GB of documents. The defendant is liable to a term of imprisonment of up to 10 years and a fine of $ 250,000.

Given all of the above, Apple had ample evidence at its disposal to file a lawsuit against the engineer. The company filed an official complaint with the judicial authorities, who were then able to confirm that at least 60% of the information found on his wife's computer belonged to the confidential data.

Interestingly, when Xiaolang Zhang was arrested at the California airport, he was expecting a flight to the Asian country. It is not yet possible to say whether the information that he stole was passed on to third parties including Xpeng. This company was founded in 2014 by He Xiaopeng, a Chinese entrepreneur who was previously responsible for UCWeb. Just in 2014, they got $ 350 million in funding from Alibaba and Foxconn.

It seems that some are doing all they can to excel in the race to dominate the auto sector, regardless of whether it leads to unethical actions about others. Just last month, Elon Musk discovered a saboteur inside Tesla who also obtained confidential information from the company.