San Francisco, Aug 23 : A former Chinese-born Apple employee, who was accused of theft of trade secrets regarding the tech giant’s automotive division has admitted guilt in an American court in the US.Xiaolang Zhang was accused of downloading internal Apple documents about the car Apple plans to reveal in 2024.
According to an CNBC report that was released late on Monday Zhang is facing as long as 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.The sentence is scheduled in November.
Zhang was accused of downloading internal Apple files that contained “engineering schematics of circuit boards to create an autonomous vehicle”.
He was also accused of using references manuals and PDFs that described Apple’s prototypes as well as requirements for prototypes in the report.
In the course of an internal investigation Apple discovered the fact that he had transferred about 24GB of sensitive data to his wife’s laptop through AirDrop.
He also had taken circuit boards and servers from the company’s autonomous vehicle lab.
Zhang was detained in the San Jose airport in the US in 2018 as he tried to travel to China.
Another former employee, Jizhong Chen, is being investigated for theft of Apple’s trade secrets electric vehicle division.
Apple has intensified its efforts to create self-driving cars and has filed a number of new patents in hardware and software that relate to ride comfort, such as suspension and seats.
The iPhone maker is also working on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the Internet of Things (IoT), according to media reports.
In January of this year Hyundai Motor was said to be in talks with Apple regarding self-driving technology.Hyundai Motor denied the claims.South Korean automaker later denied the rumor.
Apple isn’t revealing much about its self-driving capabilities.
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