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Former Apple worker pleads guilty to stealing company data

An engineer who worked for AppleZiaolang Zhang, has pleaded guilty to stealing company trade secrets during the period he was working on it. Zhang, who worked on an autonomous car project between 2015 and 2018, according to CNBC, left his position at Apple in that year, and told his supervisor that he was going to start working for Guangzhou and Xiaopeng Motors Technology, a startup dedicated to vehicles. electronics which is also known as Xpeng.

Something about Zhang and his future work did not convince his former Apple managers, since the company opened an investigation and discovered that had transferred 24 GB of “highly problematic” data to his wife’s laptop via AirDrop. In addition also it had taken several circuit boards and a server from Apple’s autonomous vehicle lab.

The company then filed a lawsuit against him, who was detained in July 2018 at the San José airport when he was going to fly to China. Now, four years later, he has pleaded guilty in a San José court. Zhang, who faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for theft of company secrets, is under gag order. The sentence will be read on November 14.

Zhang is accused of downloading internal Apple files about the Apple car project. Specifically, a 25-page document that included engineering schematics for a circuitry panel for an autonomous vehicle. He is also accusing of stealing reference manuals and PDFs that describe Apple’s prototypes, as well as the requirements of these prototypes.

He is not the only person to be accused of stealing Apple’s automotive trade secrets or transferring company secret materials to XPeng. In 2019, another former Apple employee was accused of trying to steal manuals, schematics, diagrams, and photos from the Apple car project to pass them to China. His case is currently under investigation. Tesla also assured that a former employee there was passed source code on your autopilot system to your iCloud account and then passed on that information, too to XPeng.

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