Uber Finds One Allegedly Stolen Waymo File -- On An Employee's Personal Device (techcrunch.com)

Uber said today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee -- who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber's -- on the employee's personal computer. From a report on TechCrunch: The document was found on a personal device belonging to Sameer Kshirsagar, Uber's attorney Arturo Gonzalez said at a court hearing today. It's the first time that Uber has acknowledged that any of Waymo's documents are in the possession of any Uber employees. However, Uber emphasized that the document was not found on Uber's computers. "We did collect documents from him and thus far we have only found one document from his computers that matches the documents identified in the complaint," Gonzalez said. Waymo claims that Kshirsagar downloaded several confidential documents in June 2016, one month before resigning and joining Anthony Levandowski at Uber. The names of the five specific documents are partially redacted in court filings, but one references "laser questions" and another "lens placement."

Comments

Lyft, Waymo, etc. shouldn't even bother

[ErichTheRed]

Like them or not, Uber has succeeded in their quest for ubiquitous brand recognition. They're the "Kleenex" of taxi-hailing apps. I work a lot with people who travel extensively for business, and Uber is practically a verb in their vocabularies -- "I'll just uber to the airport" They're offering new American Express cardmembers $200 in free rides just to drive everyone else out of the business, including their direct competitors and taxi companies. And, they're charging extremely low rates, offering tons of promotions, etc. Once you get big enough and are backed by enough VC money, it's pretty much over.

Even if Uber is found to have stolen the documents, they'll just peel off a million bucks from the VC pile and move on.

Re:Wait

[networkBoy]

This is why I have *no* work contamination of my personal machines.
I only bring my phone to work, and I concede they can search the filesystem if they want (it's really no different than a USB drive afterall).

If they expected to search my home machine I'd refuse and lawyer up when they tried to discipline me for it.

On a related note:
Uber is handling this all sorts of wrong.

This happened while I was at Intel, an employee grabbed a stack of confidential and top secret Itanium docs and *while on sabbatical* got a job at AMD. When AMD found out he stole the IP (to help him get a leg up at his new employer) they called Intel, and the FBI; obviously sacking the guy as well.

There is a story (I don't know if true) about a guy getting the formula for Coke and offering to sell it to Pepsi. Pepsi called Coke and asked how they wanted to handle it. The decision was that Pepsi would offer to buy the formula. When the guy came in to sell it, the Pepsi exec accepted the envelope of docs, handed them to a waiting Coke lawyer, and nodded to the waiting FBI agent to arrest the guy.

In both these cases the company potentially receiving the secret sauce for a competitor made great efforts to inform said competitor and distance themselves from *any* question of impropriety. How is it that Uber saw no need for verifying poached employees brought nothing but what was in their heads with them from the competition?