Apple has sued a former employee who worked for it for a while and said in the lawsuit that this employee sold and disclosed trade secrets and details about Apple products that have not been announced yet.
What's the story
Apple accused a person called Simon Lancaster The company's product design engineer had sold its secrets to an unnamed media reporter in order to achieve some publicity for his next project, which he aims to start after leaving the company.
Lancaster had begun communicating with the reporter in 2018 to talk about the possibility of obtaining information, and then spent the next two year communicating. Reportedly, Lancaster contacted his correspondent in the spring of 2019 and asked him to investigate rumors about an Apple product that could create a problem for his company. New.
Apple's lawsuit also says that Lancaster bragged to an outside party shortly after that conversation and indicated that a media outlet would write a story about his startup if it could get $ XNUMX million in financing.
In October of 2019, Lancaster informed the reporter that he was planning to leave Apple and provided him with classified information about the company's products and asked him if he would like to write a story about a veteran Apple designer who spent about 12 years at Apple and decided to leave to found his wonderful company. He asked Lancaster for additional information about an undeclared project that Apple referred to as The exe project.
In October of the same year, Lancaster submitted a notice of resignation to the company, but he was in contact with the reporter, who asked them the next day to bring specific documents before leaving. Apple claimed that Lancaster attended a meeting about Project X after submitting a notice of his resignation and despite receiving instructions not to attend, he attended. In order to obtain more information and deliver it to the reporter.
In addition to disclosing information about some of the company's products and the unannounced X project in an attempt to promote his new company, Apple said that Lancaster used his own credentials with the company in order to download confidential information until the end of his work at midnight on the first of November 2019.
According to Apple, Lancaster logged in from an external website at 10:24 p.m. that day - this time to obtain materials that will help the new business owner.
Apple responded
Tens of thousands of company employees work tirelessly every day on new products, services and features, hoping to please our customers and enable them to change the world, but the theft of ideas and the disclosure of confidential information undermines the efforts of its employees and harms the interest of the company and its customers, and because the company takes very seriously intentional theft and violating policies and ethics The company said Apple will do everything it can to protect the innovations it holds dear.
Finally, Lancaster began his career at Apple in 2008 and spent about 11 years inside the company’s walls, starting as an advanced materials engineer and then a product design engineer. He also worked on a 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro and other products that had not yet been released and in 2019, he decided to leave to take up the position. Head of Consumer Products at Arris Composites, a professional material design firm.
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