Apple is suing a former worker for allegedly stealing confidential Imaginative and prescient Professional headset analysis earlier than leaving to hitch Snap’s product design group. Within the complaint filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on June twenty fourth, Apple accuses Di Liu of downloading 1000’s of paperwork containing proprietary info from Apple’s inside techniques and saving them to his private cloud storage account in his ultimate days as a senior design engineer for the Imaginative and prescient Professional.
In response to the lawsuit, Liu falsely claimed he was quitting his job for well being causes and didn’t disclose that he had a brand new job lined up as a product design engineer for Snap. This prevented Apple from instantly revoking Liu’s entry to inside techniques, a typical protocol activated by the corporate upon discover that staff are becoming a member of a competitor. Apple alleges that this allowed Liu to repeat a “huge quantity” of proprietary info that he might later entry after being locked out of Apple’s community.
“Mr. Liu’s actions had been deliberate; logs on his Apple-issued work laptop computer present that Mr. Liu individually chosen the folders he copied and, in some circumstances, renamed and reorganized them after shifting them to his private cloud storage account,” Apple stated within the grievance. “Additional, Mr. Liu took actions to hide motion of the recordsdata, deliberately deleting recordsdata from his Apple-issued work laptop computer.”
Apple says it’s unable to find out precisely what was downloaded by Liu, however argues the overlap between the data Liu took with Snap’s AR Spectacles products “means that Mr. Liu intends to make use of Apple’s Proprietary Info at Snap.” In response to the grievance, Apple is pursuing unspecified monetary damages from Liu for breaching contractual obligations and requesting that Liu be compelled to return the stolen paperwork.
Apple has not named Snap as a defendant within the go well with. Snap said in a statement to SiliconValley that it had reviewed Apple’s claims, and had “no purpose to imagine they’re associated to this particular person’s employment or conduct at Snap.”