Apple has accused a former employee of stealing confidential research about the Vision Pro headset before joining Snap.
The lawsuit claims that the ex-employee took thousands of sensitive files and saved them to his personal cloud account.
The tech giant pointed out that the information he took could be useful to Snap’s AR Spectacles products.
Apple has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, accusing him of stealing confidential research about the Vision Pro headset before leaving the company to work at Snap. The lawsuit claims that Di Liu, a former senior design engineer for the Vision Pro, took thousands of sensitive files and saved them to his personal cloud account just before leaving Apple.
SurveyAccording to the lawsuit, Liu told Apple that he was quitting for health reasons and did not disclose that he had already accepted a job as a product design engineer at Snap, reports The Verge. This false information prevented Apple from taking immediate steps to block his access to internal systems, which is the company’s usual policy when an employee joins a rival.
The tech giant believes this gave Liu the chance to copy a “massive volume” of proprietary data that he could access later, even after losing access to Apple’s network.
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“Mr. Liu’s actions were deliberate; logs on his Apple-issued work laptop show that Mr. Liu individually selected the folders he copied and, in some cases, renamed and reorganized them after moving them to his personal cloud storage account,” Apple said in the complaint. “Further, Mr. Liu took actions to conceal movement of the files, intentionally deleting files from his Apple-issued work laptop.”
The company said it cannot be sure exactly what Liu downloaded, but pointed out that the kind of information he took could be useful to Snap’s AR Spectacles products. Apple claims this raises concerns that Liu might use the stolen information at Snap.
Apple is asking the court to order Liu to return all the documents and is seeking financial compensation for breaking his contract. However, the company has not named Snap as a defendant in the case.
Also read: Apple may let ChatGPT and Anthropic power Siri amid internal AI setbacks
Snap responded to the claims, saying it had reviewed Apple’s allegations and had “no reason to believe they are related to this individual’s employment or conduct at Snap.”
Well, this isn’t the first time Apple has taken legal action against former workers for leaking confidential information. The company withdrew a lawsuit against a former iOS engineer in February and had previously settled a similar case in 2022 with a former design architect, both of whom were accused of leaking confidential trade secrets to the media.
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Ayushi Jain
Tech news writer by day, BGMI player by night. Combining my passion for tech and gaming to bring you the latest in both worlds. View Full Profile
