Apple has accused a former senior Vision Pro engineer of stealing thousands of documents containing plans for unreleased features, and taking them to his new role working on glasses–based projects for Snap.
A lawsuit alleges that Di Liu claimed he was quitting his job for health reasons, hiding from Apple that his true plan was to join Snapchat as a developer in a “substantially similar” role…
SiliconValley reports.
Di Liu of San Jose told Apple he was resigning his position as a design engineer to spend more time with his family and look after his health, but he had secretly taken a job with a rival, and before leaving the iPhone giant, he stole a “massive volume” of its trade secrets, Apple alleges in a lawsuit against Liu […]
“Because Mr. Liu did not inform Apple that he was departing to work on another company’s product, Mr. Liu was permitted to stay on at Apple for the standard two-week departure period rather than immediately losing access to Apple’s proprietary information,” the lawsuit alleged.
Three days before leaving Apple, Liu used his company credentials to download thousands of Apple documents containing trade secrets, and upload them into his personal cloud storage, the lawsuit claimed.
Apple has internal security systems intended to detect employees accessing or downloading unusual volumes of documents or copying them from a company network to individual devices. The company has a history of aggressively pursuing former employees it believes have misused confidential company information.
This includes legal action against its former materials lead Simon Lancaster, chip engineers who left to form startup Rivos, a former Apple Car engineer who joined a Chinese self–driving car startup, and another Project Titan engineer who was last year jailed for stealing trade secrets.
In this case, Apple is seeking unspecified damages from Liu, as well as the return of all the information taken. The company is additionally seeking a court order to give it access to Liu’s devices in order to ensure compliance, after the engineer allegedly took steps to delete logs of his file transfers.
The site says that Liu could not be reached for comment, and that Snap is not accused of any wrongdoing.
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