Apple sues former Apple Watch staffer alleging theft of trade secrets for Oppo

On Apple Watch Series 4 or later, the ECG app can record heartbeat and rhythm using the electrical heart sensor. The ECG waveform stored in the Health app can be shared as a PDF.
Apple is suing a former Apple Watch team employee who left to join Oppo, alleging that he “conspired to steal Apple’s trade secrets relating to Apple Watch and to disclose them to his new employers.”
Jay Peters for The Verge:
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Ahead of starting his new job at Oppo, the employee, Dr. Chen Shi, attended “dozens” of meetings with technical members on the Apple Watch team to learn about their work and downloaded 63 documents “from a protected Box folder” that he loaded onto a USB drive, according to the lawsuit. Shi allegedly sent a message to Oppo saying that he was working to “collect as much information as possible” before starting his job. And he searched the internet for terms like “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?” from his Apple-issued MacBook before leaving the company.
Shi was formerly a sensor system architect at Apple, and the company says he had “a front row seat to Apple’s development of its cutting-edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents, and specifications for ECG sensor technology.”
He now heads up a team working on sensing technology at Oppo — which Apple says it learned because of “messages he left on his Apple-issued work iPhone.”

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MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security reports over 60 CCP-related espionage cases across 20 states from February 2021 to August 2024, with approximately 80% of economic espionage prosecutions linked to China and 60% of trade secret theft cases having a nexus to the CCP. These cases involve stealing intellectual property (IP) from sectors like technology, aerospace, healthcare, and energy. The FBI opens new counterintelligence cases related to the CCP roughly every 12 hours.
Smart companies hire smartly. Stupid companies get fleeced.
Blind, deaf, and dumb.

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