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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.)

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

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