In late March, Veronica Navarro realized she had what she describes in a recent court filing as “escalating employment issues” with her employer, Zoox.
Sensing that she might need to defend her three and a half years of work as a senior program manager for the growing robotaxi company, she downloaded data from her company-owned laptop onto her personal external hard drive.
Navarro said she gathered the “data and documents necessary to demonstrate that I had always performed my duties and responsibilities at or above the standards required by Zoox management,” according to the filing.
But on March 28, Zoox used BitLocker, a Windows software tool, to encrypt Navarro’s Seagate hard drive, locking not only the data she downloaded, Navarro claims, but all kinds of personal information, including her will and estate planning documents; financial data; tickets and plans for a trip to Europe; and decades of family photos that don’t exist anywhere else.
Most precious of all is the medical information about her father, who is suffering from liver and kidney disease and expected to die within months, she said in the filing. The records are critical to her campaign to win him a compassionate release from state prison, where he’s been incarcerated for 35 years, she continued
Several hours after her Seagate drive was locked, Navarro learned by email that Zoox had fired her. Zoox continues to demand that Navarro surrender her personal drive as a condition of the company decrypting and returning her data, she claims.
“This situation is devastating for me and my family,” Navarro said in the court filing. “Aside from being illegal extortion, I believe Zoox’s refusal to release my personal data is motivated by malice, spite, paranoia and revenge.”
Details of the conflict are revealed in a lawsuit Zoox filed in San Francisco federal court late last month, with both sides claiming the other is holding their information “hostage.” Zoox accuses Navarro of stealing trade secrets after she was put on a performance improvement plan, and learning that her work was being scrutinized. Navarro argues Zoox’s actions amount to “corporate bullying” and “computer crime and extortion.”
The fight has shades of the digital skullduggery in Waymo’s trade-secret theft claims against Uber and engineer Anthony Levandowski. In that case, Levandowski was similarly accused of downloading and stealing proprietary information from his employer, Google, to jumpstart Uber’s autonomous vehicle program. Waymo ultimately extracted a punishing sum from Levandowski but a pardon from President Donald Trump spared the engineer from the clink.
Zoox certainly shares Waymo’s ambitions. Founded in 2014, its ski gondola-looking vehicles have recently proliferated on San Francisco’s streets. Its autonomous, all-electric robotaxis without a steering wheel or pedal are “one-of-kind,” the company says, as is the artificial intelligence that pilots them. Passengers will soon be able to hail the robotaxis on the Las Vegas strip, and afterwards in San Francisco, Austin, Miami and Los Angeles, Zoox says. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company has estimated the autonomous driving industry could generate up to $400 billion by 2035.
Zoox’s lawsuit follows Waymo’s playbook of bringing the hammer down on a former employee whom the company attempts to portray as a rogue trade secret thief. But there are important differences, including the means and motivations. Lewandowski had reaped a $120 million bonus from Google, his expensive defense was paid by Uber, and he and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had aspirations (or delusions) of AV grandeur. Navarro’s resistance against Zoox is of much smaller financial stakes but is of bigger personal value.
Zoox said company policy prohibited her illegal downloading of sensitive files, and hundreds of screenshots of company data, as well as what appear to be videos of confidential internal meetings, according to the lawsuit. When Navarro’s job performance fell short, Zoox said, it offered her a “performance improvement plan” or a severance package, according to a court filing. She rejected both.
Navarro has refused to return the files, “instead holding them hostage unless Zoox accedes to her demands,” the company said in its complaint. She was fired after she refused to cooperate with the investigation, Zoox said. The company last week won a temporary court order forbidding Navarro from sharing Zoox’s proprietary information.
Zoox said in an email that it declined to comment on pending litigation.
Navarro’s lawyer, Stephen Jaffe, has argued that Zoox’s lawsuit filed in late April should be dismissed because she in fact sued Zoox first, two weeks earlier, in state court in Redwood City. Requiring her to fight in two different courthouses, Zoox’s goal is to “harass, delay and drain” Navarro’s resources, Jaffe said in a filing.
He didn’t respond to a Gazetteer request for comment.
In both cases, Navarro maintains that she has never shared any proprietary or confidential Zoox data with anyone outside of Zoox not authorized to see it. She also argues that until she was terminated from her job, she was fully authorized to access and copy the Zoox data.
Navarro said that over the course of her employment, she downloaded data to do her job off-site, a customary practice “which was well known to Zoox management, who never objected,” according to her court filing.
