Former Apple Engineer Flees to China After Charges

YEAT ANOTHER FORMER APPLE EMPLOYEE SUSPECTED OF PROPRIETARY THEFT

This is getting to be a bad habit for Apple. There is now a 3^rd (that we know of) former apple employee who has allegedly stolen or tried to steal autonomous tech and giving it to China. But this lucky third has also been charged. Yet the former Apple engineer has fled the United States to… China. It’s not clear if the 35-year-old Weibao Wang successfully stole any tech or not. But there does seem to be a trail, where Apple and authorities seem to know that he at least tried to do so over a 4-month period.

FORMER APPLE ENGINEER MAY HAVE STOLEN SELF-DRIVING CAR TECH, FLED TO CHINA AVOIDING CHARGES

The maybe stolen tech involves Apple’s development of self-driving cars, and the indictment refers to Wand relaying some of that information to an unknown company in China. Wang first started working for Apple’s annotation team back in 2016. And that work included “broad access” to the company’s databases that only 2,700 out of Apple’s 135,000 employees could see. Wang only worked for the company for a year before he handed in his resignation notice in April, 2018. Not surprisingly, Wang didn’t tell his then supervisor what his plans were moving forward.

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FORMER ENGINEER MAY HAVE STOLEN TECH TO LINE UP JOB AT ANOTHER COMPANY IN CHINA

And that is the lede for another interesting tidbit. Wang had accepted a full-time staff engineer position at a Chinese-based company in November 2017, over 4 months before he handed in his notice of resignation. And a month after he had left, Apple realized he had accessed sensitive and confidential data relating to Apple’s autonomous driving systems’ software in the months before he left. And then there’s how investigators found copies of proprietary Apple data sets on his personal computer at home, as well as an external hard drive.

Industrial espionage and theft is alive and well in Silicon Valley!