Tesla Claims Engineer Stole Secrets Just Three Days on the Job | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Claims Engineer Stole Secrets Just Three Days on the Job

bloomberg.com

Not gonna lie, this sounds like something I might accidentally do. I don’t know if this guy had a malicious intent or not but I can see his point of view. I install Dropbox on my work computer and sync some of my editor settings over and some other personal things. I never transfer company docs but I could see it accidentally happening if I meant to copy something to ~/Desktop but accidentally autocompleted ~/Dropbox.

Gonna have to remember to watch out for this one if I ever go back to a big company.

And this is one reason why I don't install tools like that onto a company system. The closest I get is logging on to services through a browser. For something like getting a config file onto my system this would be done via the Dropbox (or more likely Github) web interface to my account.

The problem is that the engineer claims he only transferred some new hire information to his Dropbox. However, Tesla claims that he grabbed a bunch of other things like scripts and was attempting to delete them after he granted Tesla security engineers access to his Dropbox. I think we'll need to wait until more information comes out because either the engineer is lying or Tesla is lying, but it should be relatively easy to tell if they have Dropbox giving them information.

If the engineer did copy scripts to his Dropbox, that is a serious security violation. Nearly everywhere I have worked, you always get security training that says under no circumstances copy company stuff to a third-party system. Even if you don't have malicious intent, security folks have no way of tracking what you do with the stuff after that.

> He said he transferred it to his personal Dropbox cloud account to use later on his personal computer.

Some companies don't draw the line between personal and work computers.

Most schools, colleges, and universities expect students now to supply their own computers.

But, while it's not surprising that someone today could consider that it might be ok just to take the data home like it's no big deal, I think Tesla isn't making a mistake in taking this to court, if it was clear in the contract(s) that the employee signed that such behavior was unacceptable.

You could jump to conclusions reading the title that the employee planned to sell the data or was working for a competitor, and you could be correct. But what's at issue, it seems, is that the employee didn't meet their contractual obligation.

> I think Tesla isn't making a mistake in taking this to court, if it was clear in the contract(s) that the employee signed that such behavior was unacceptable.

Tesla could fire this guy, but taking it to court is a huge mistake. It sends a message for potential employees that if you make a mistake at Tesla, not only you can be fired, you can be sued. Personally, I wouldn't take a job at Tesla because I doubt Tesla pays enough money for me to take such risk.

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