Apple has filed a lawsuit against a former employee who allegedly leaked company trade secrets to a news outlet for more than a year for personal gain. Simon Lancaster, a former engineer and product architecture designer, is accused of abusing his position to gain access to information that was not related to his field of work. Lancaster allegedly traded the data he stole from the tech giant in exchange for positive coverage of a startup he worked for after leaving Apple.
Lancaster worked for 11 years at Apple, where he was involved in the process of creating prototype products and designing hardware, including the Macbook, iPad and iMac.
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The court documents unsealed in California federal court on March 11 state the following: “Despite having worked at Apple for more than a decade, Lancaster abused his position and the trust placed in him by the company to systematically steal and leak confidential Apple trade secrets in an effort to gain personal gain. He exploited his ‘seniority’ to gain access to internal meetings and documents outside the scope of his job that contained Apple trade secrets, and provided those trade secrets to an outside media correspondent in exchange for favorable coverage of Arris Composites, a materials design startup that he joined in November 2019 as head of consumer products.”
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The lawsuit, first reported by Apple Insider, says Lancaster began talking to the reporter on November 29, 2018, and continued to communicate with him over the next year via phone calls, text messages, and emails. They exchanged information about unreleased Apple products, surprise feature changes to existing products, and information about future product announcements.
Additionally, Lancaster reportedly began meeting in person with the agency's correspondent in September 2019 and physically exchanging documents and other information.
According to Apple, communication between the two continued after Lancaster resigned, with the reporter publishing the stolen trade secrets in articles, citing “a source” within Apple. The lawsuit also says that the stolen information may still be misused today.
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The trade secrets that Lancaster allegedly revealed include updates to existing Apple products, as well as plans for new devices. Additionally, Apple Insider notes that the iPhone maker discovered after an internal investigation that Lancaster also used its company devices several times to send the confidential information that the reporter had requested. The investigation also revealed that Lancaster “took specific steps to obtain additional Apple trade secrets.”.
Lancaster resigned from Apple on October 15, 2019, and began working at Arris Composites. He is accused of downloading a “significant number” of confidential Apple documents from its corporate network to his personal computer on his last day of employment. The information he allegedly stole would have been beneficial to his new role at Arris Composites.
Apple accuses Lancaster of multiple violations, including violating the Trade Secrets Act and breaching a written contract.
