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Comment by AnaniasAnanas | Hacker News Reader

NDAs and non-compete agreements should not ever be considered as valid contracts by the government.

Some NDA's can be too broad, but this is a bad take. It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets. This is what privacy regulations are all about. (At Facebook in particular, disclosing stuff about users is pretty bad, see lots of news stories over the last few years.)

The balance between protecting privacy and making abuses public is pretty nuanced and doesn't lend itself to one-bit thinking.

> needs to be

Nothing needs to be anything, though the world order would certainly look different and reflect the interests of different classes of people than today

No. But, in the absence of NDAs and other agreements for both employees and external partners, you'd see a great deal more limits on sharing information both within and without companies to a strictly need to know basis. Certainly those limits exist today to a degree because NDAs basically just allow for consequences. But if you can't keep someone from turning around and sharing anything you tell them other than through some sort of mutual trust, you'll be less inclined to share it.

Seems like looking at this from a class perspective only complicates things further?Poor people often have secrets and can be pretty vulnerable to attack if they're disclosed.

> It needs to be possible to hire people that you trust not to disclose all your secrets, and your customer's secrets

I disagree, it needs to be possible for whistle-blowers to operate freely. It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide.

> This is what privacy regulations are all about

I am pretty sure that this is a separate thing to NDAs. Nevertheless I believe that the solution should be technical rather than legal, with things like end to end encryption and public key cryptography.

That's just wishing the problem away with techno-optimism. When you call someone at a company on the phone to get help, they often need to access your account. If they don't have access to anything, they're mostly useless and you get no help.

We're a long way away from making everything self-service and companies not needing to hire anyone to do support. Until all the support people get laid off, they need to be trusted at least to some extent. (Internal controls can be helpful.)

>It should also be possible to disclose to the whole world new and superior techniques and technologies that a company tries to hide.

Whether or not a company really benefits from this in a particular case, the consequence of prohibiting any legal protections against the broad sharing of company information would be a lot more secrecy and compartmentalization of information.

Which privacy regulations protect corporations more than they protect actual meat people?

I think you're painting with a very broad brush there.

NDAs and non-competes have their uses. It's when they become part of the default boilerplate that everyone signs to get a job that the problems start.

> NDAs and non-competes have their uses

I have yet to see a valid use that does not hinder whistle-blowing, the advancement of technology, or does not abuse the employees. I am sure that you will find a few valid use-cases if you try hard enough, however in the vast majority of cases they are used in order to repress the rights of others.

>I have yet to see a valid use that does not hinder whistle-blowing

The legal system isn't static. If your company is breaking the law and you report it to authorities, your NDA will be unenforceable.

Do any companies use something more like a blackmailer's NDA, which works without a legal system?

I'm not sure exactly how it would work, and perhaps it wouldn't work in practice, but I imagine it might involve paying the (former) employee a certain sum every month for their continued cooperation, and the employer would reserve the right to unilaterally cancel the arrangement: it would be "discretionary" or whatever. So the employee has a motive to cooperate (unless they're terminally ill ...) but there's nothing to "enforce".

If there were no NDAs then companies would exploit patent, trademarks and copywrite even more than they already do. If they kept NDAs limited to trade secrets then there wouldn't be a problem

I think Non-competes should be limited to while youre actually working there

Companies seem to try to abuse patent, trademarks, and copyrights as much as they can anyway. The best of-course would be if NDAs, patents, and copyrights all disappeared overnight. Trademarks are generally fine but they can be abused.

NDAs need to be heavily restricted, but it's a difficult distinction to draw between "trade secrets of the job" (which arguably should be protected) and "abusive working conditions" (which should not)

Honestly why the hell are trade secrets protected expect for misguised sense of intellectual property that forgets the concept was a contract and not a natural right?

They don't even have the benefit of disclosure which patents were meant to give - to prevent said knowledge being lost. Trade secrets are why we had to investigate Damascus Steel reproduction throughly and still speculate.

They give the useful arts and sciences nothing and yet they get free resources for enforcement.

I believe the proper legal response from the state for breach of trade secrets should be "Wow, sucks to be you!" We really shouldn't be promoting that artificial scarcity and restriction of knowledge.

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