Google filed a lawsuit last week against an Indian semiconductor engineer for the alleged online publication of trade secrets related to the designs of Google Pixel chips, which as you know are the Tensor G, exclusive chips from Google.
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Subscribe (it's FREE) ►The legal action was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas alleging that the engineer, Harshit Roy, was involved in the “misappropriation of trade secrets.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Harshit Roy worked at Google for nearly four years starting in 2020 in Bengaluru.
His role, according to the court documents, made him responsible for assisting with the design, development, and implementation of next-generation unreleased system-on-chips used in Google’s Pixel devices, including smartphones, tablets, and wearables.
An engineer who wants to destroy Google? It seems so, and the reasons are not clear
Google stated that it became aware that Roy had collected photos of its trade secrets in December 2023 and addressed the matter, which resulted in Roy agreeing to delete all the photos and provide proof of their destruction.
Somehow, despite all this, he continued working until March 2024. He resigned to attend a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin.
After leaving Google, Roy allegedly began posting confidential information on Twitter, where he supposedly shared already deleted photographs of internal documents and Pixel processing chips. Apparently, he continued to post what Google called “non-public internal files” on his LinkedIn account. And apparently, he threatened the search giant with disclosing more information.
The text that accompanied the posts included statements like “remember that empires fall and you will too” and “don’t expect me to adhere to any confidentiality agreement.”
Google claims that it issued takedown requests that, according to the lawsuit, Roy ignored. According to Google, it made good faith attempts “to resolve this without judicial intervention.”
Meanwhile, Google claims, Roy continued to disclose secrets. According to the lawsuit, in early November he published 158 photographs with detailed information about the exclusive strengths of the SoC, the specific issues of Pixel smartphones that the SoC aims to resolve, an Excel spreadsheet, and much more.
Google has requested unspecified monetary compensation and that Roy be prevented from sharing more secrets. As for Roy’s motivation, it is not clear, but surely in the coming weeks we will learn more about the matter.
