Spying is not always James Bond or cloak-and-dagger kinds of stuff.
Sometimes secrets can fall into the wrong hands through industrial espionage.
For instance, U.S. federal authorities say former Apple employee Weibao Wang took with him confidential Apple material regarding self-driving cars when he resigned from Apple and joined a startup owned by Baidu, a major Chinese technology company.
Wang, 35, indicted by a federal grand jury in May, joined Apple as a software engineer in March 2016, and worked with an Apple team “that designed and developed hardware and software for autonomous systems, which can have a variety of applications, such as self-driving cars,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California.
Wang left Apple after about a month and in November 2017, took a full-time job as a staff engineer “with the U.S. subsidiary of a company headquartered in the People’s Republic of China…and was allegedly working to develop self-driving cars,” the news release said.
Although his current LinkedIn site still has Wang employed by Apple, the U.S. attorney’s office did not name the Chinese company for whom Wang allegedly stole secrets.
Reuters last year identified Wang as an executive of Jidu, the electric vehicle subsidiary of Baidu. Wang’s mention by Reuters was in a June 2022, story of Jidu developing a self-driving concept car.
When he left Apple on April 16, 2018, “Apple identified Wang as having accessed large amounts of sensitive proprietary and confidential information in the days leading up to his departure from Apple,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office news release.
Hellbound and Down 