Apple lawsuit shows company’s extreme focus on confidentiality

Apple on Thursday sued a former California federal court employee over allegations that Simon Lancaster, who worked as a product design architect, passed on trade secrets to a member of the media and asked for favorable coverage from companies he was involved with. .

In its lawsuit, Apple did not name the media correspondent, nor the details that Lancaster allegedly leaked.

The case highlights Apple’s approach to building products in secret. Although all technology companies closely guard intellectual property, Apple’s culture emphasizes this deeply and the company has developed a need-to-know system called ‘disclosure’, where employees of a project often have no knowledge of other parts of the project. to prevent leaks. .

According to the case, a reporter reached out to Lancaster in 2018 and the two communicated the following year before Lancaster left Apple in November 2019. During that time, Lancaster provided the reporter with information about unissued products, including internal documents, according to the lawsuit. At one point, Lancaster told another contact that the reporter would cover a company he was involved in if it received $ 1 million in funding.

In November 2019, Arris Composites announced that it had hired Lancaster.

Apple considers details of products that have not yet been released to be important trade secrets, because a core part of the company’s marketing is aimed at creating ‘surprise and joy’ when new products are introduced during carefully choreographed launch events.

The lawsuit takes a look at the confidentiality terms in which Apple designers and engineers manufacture new products:

Some tasks from the lawsuit:

• Apple product teams work in secret, often for years and with a significant personal burden.
• Apple secret information is only available to employees and contractors after they have signed a ‘strict’ confidentiality agreement.
• Even within Apple, employees are limited in what they can learn through a system that requires them to be ‘made public’ for a project.
• Employees can only be ‘disclosed’ about a secret project if a disclosed employee asks for access to them and cites a business reason for the disclosure.
• Apple has an internal tool to manage disclosures across the company.
• All employees who have secret projects must attend security training that reminds them that they can not even tell their family members about the secrets they are working on.
• Any person at an Apple company without a license plate must be accompanied by an Apple employee.
• Apple believes that competitors are starting to work on their own products after reading reports on upcoming Apple products.
• Apple believes that leaks about upcoming products could reduce customer demand for what is currently on the market and reduce the morale of the teams working on it.

“Tens of thousands of Apple employees work tirelessly every day on new products, services and features hoping to please our customers and enable them to change the world. The theft of ideas and confidential information undermines their efforts, which Apple and hurting our customers, “he said. Apple spokesman said in a statement. “We take seriously the individual’s deliberate theft of our trade secrets, the violation of our ethics and our policies, all for personal gain. We will do everything in our power to protect the innovations we love so much.”

Messages sent to Lancaster and a representative of Arris Composites for comment were not immediately returned.