Former Apple engineer who stole Project Titan trade secrets sentenced to 120 days in prison

Xiaolang Zhang, a former Apple engineer who pled guilty to stealing Project Titan trade secrets, was this week sentenced to 120 days of imprisonment and 3 years supervised release.
Chance Miller for 9to5Mac:
‎

Zhang will also pay restitution of $146,984.00. California federal prosecutors had asked the judge for a one-year prison sentence in the case.
The United States FBI first changed Zhang with stealing trade secrets back in 2018. At the time, it was reported that Zhang had taken parental leave from Apple and visited China during this time. When his parental leave at Apple was due to end, he informed the company that he would not be returning.
Instead, Zhang moved to China and joined XMotors, a Chinese-based startup developing autonomous technology for cars. Apple claimed to have noticed evasive behavior around the time of his exit, which prompted an investigation by the company’s New Product Security Team. This included an investigation into his network activity and Apple devices, which were surrendered when he left the company.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: 120 days is joke, but, hey, it’s California, so it’s amazing he got any jail time at all. (If you think Zhang is who’ll be paying that fine, you haven’t been paying attention.)
As we wrote back in 2019, this “seems like an avoidable problem.”
Back in 2018, Reuters reported that the charges filed in U.S. federal court alleged that Zhang disclosed intentions to work for a Chinese electric car startup and booked a last-minute flight to China after downloading the plan for a circuit board for a self-driving car.
In 2019, another Chinese national was charged with stealing Apple’s autonomous vehicle trade secrets. Jizhong Chen was charged with stealing proprietary information from the company’s self-driving car project while applying to work for a Chinese rival.
A search of a hard drive owned by Chen found thousands of sensitive Apple documents along with 100 photos taken inside the company’s self-driving facility, according to an FBI affidavit.
‎
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post Former Apple engineer who stole Project Titan trade secrets sentenced to 120 days in prison appeared first on MacDailyNews.