Apple Car: ex-employee faces 60 years in prison for stealing secrets
The United States Department of Justice charged Weibao Wang, a former Apple employee, for stealing trade secrets. He is accused of stealing critical Apple Car information.
New data theft linked to the Apple Car
Weibao Wang was part of the annotation team when he was at Apple. He was working on algorithms intended to speed up the process of annotating real-world objects. Because of his role, he was granted wide access to databases containing information for the project. The information he had access to was limited to a few thousand of Apple’s 135,000 full-time employees.
The employee had signed confidentiality and intellectual property agreements before being granted access to Apple’s databases. He also underwent secrecy training which covered the consequences of data theft. Nevertheless, in 2016 he downloaded the entire source code for Apple’s autonomous driving system and stole other information about autonomous systems and hardware shortly before resigning from his role at Apple in 2018.
At the time of his resignation, Weibao Wang had not told Apple where he would go. It happened to be a position with the American subsidiary of a Chinese company that develops self-driving technology. In May 2018, Apple reviewed data access logs and found that its ex-employee accessed sensitive details just before he left. That’s when the company got the Department of Justice involved.
In June, the United States Department of Justice raided the home of the ex-employee, who had purchased a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Guangzhou (China). He managed to get to China and an arrest warrant was issued for him. If extradited and convicted, he faces up to 60 years in prison.
It is not the first time
Weibao Wang is the third employee charged with the theft of information related to the Apple Car. There was Xiaolang Zhang last year, he pleaded guilty. There is also Jizhong Chen, who did not plead guilty.
