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Former Apple employer admits stealing trade secrets for self-driving car project

An engineer who had access to information about Apple’s self-driving car project has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets about the project.

The culprit, Xiaolang Zhang was a staff of Apple from December 2015 until May 2018 and his work function centred on testing circuit boards as part of the compute team of Apple’s autonomous car project.

The former employee’s woes started when he returned from a month of paternity leave while still working with Apple at the end of April 2015.

He had reported to his supervisor that he was resigning so he could spend time with his ailing mother in China. According to reports, Zhang had also revealed that he planned to work for an electric car startup in China called Xiaopeng Motors.

The report further noted that once Zhang revealed his intentions to his supervisor at Apple, he turned out to be evasive after that period.

A member of Apple’s New Product Security Division had put interest in the case and Zhang was made to turn in his two work phones and his laptop.

The company then reviewed Zhang’s past network activity, and also performed a forensic analysis on his work devices, as well as his “activities on the Apple campus,” including swipe badge access and closed circuit TV footage.

More investigations had revealed that in the days before his attempted resignation, the majority of Zhang’s activity was “bulk searches and targeted downloading copious pages of information” from confidential databases that he had access to.

After some months of monitoring his activities and movements, Zhang was later arrested in 2018 at San Jose airport while on his way to China.

He had finalized his plans to join the Chinese EV startup called Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology, also known as Xpeng, a company backed by Alibaba.

The development has created more setbacks for Apple's quest to launch a self-driving car since the project started in 2014.

With this case, it is predicted the launch won’t happen until at least 2025.

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