An ex-Apple employee gets charged by the FBI, the U.K. fines Facebook for breaching the Data Protection Act, and Tesla plans to build a plant in China.
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Trending on LinkedIn – a former Apple employee has recently been arrested at the San Jose airport after he downloaded a plan for a self-driving car circuit board and then booked a flight to China. The man who was arrested, Xiaolang Zhang, probably didn’t do himself any favours by making it known that he was going to go work for a Chinese self-driving car startup and that he was indeed taking trade secrets with him. According to TechCrunch, Apple is working with authorities to find out exactly what happened
Also on LinkedIn – Facebook is getting a very light slap on the hand after being found guilty of two breaches of the Data Protection Act. The penalty? A whopping $660,000, the maximum punishment available to the Information commissioner’s Office. Interestingly enough, it’s also equal to the revenue Facebook makes every five-and-a-half minutes. Because of the timing of the breaches, the ICO said it couldn’t slap penalties introduced by the European General Data Protection, which caps fines at the higher level of $20 million or 4 per cent of global turnover – in Facebook’s case, $1.9 billion.
And lastly, on Reddit – Tesla has landed a deal with China to build a new auto plant in Shanghai, the company’s first factory outside of the U.S. The new factory will be double the size of the electric car maker’s global manufacturing plant. According to Reuters, the deal was announced as Tesla raised prices on US-made vehicles it sells in China. This, of course, was done to offset the cost of new tariffs imposed by China in response to the Trump administration’s tariff’s on Chinese goods. Tesla plans to produce the first cars about two years after construction begins on its Shanghai factory, ramping up to as many as 500,000 vehicles a year, the company said.
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