BENGALURU: A Texas federal judge recently ruled that a former Google engineer must remove confidential information that he shared concerning Pixel software from his social media accounts.
The links posted by Harshit Roy, the former employee at the tech giant's Bengaluru office are now not accessible. But a few screenshots of confidential information on Pixel are still available on X.
According to an order filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, Google and Google India have demonstrated that the former engineer improperly acquired trade secrets and also published them after leaving the company and moving to the US. According to reports, the judge has given Roy 24 hours to remove the posts.
Roy's LinkedIn profile says that he worked in Google between July 2020 and May 2024. Since December last year, Roy has posted on Google on his social media account X. He was hired to develop computer chips that are used in Pixel devices. He allegedly went against the confidentiality agreement signed with Google and posted information on social media accounts.
On August 20, 2024, the account allegedly belonging to Roy posted, "I need to take unethical means to get what I am entitled to. My apologies." Since then, he has posted a lot of confidential information for close to two months. Roy graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and he worked as an engineer at Google.
Earlier in March, Reuters reported that a former Google engineer was indicted in California on charges of stealing trade secrets related to AI from the Alphabet unit.
TNIE has sent a query to Google regarding this lawsuit and is awaiting its reply.