Please name a company where you would expect such behavior to be encouraged. Genuinely curious.
I just checked with my employer. To make sure I represented the situation accurately, here is what I wrote (I applied the situation to our line of business, IT security, and replaced credit cards with another type of authorization token to make it realistic for us):
> if <name of actual competitor> releases a hosted password manager, where you store all your secrets on their servers, would <our company name> condone me looking at the internals of that application in private time, or does <our name> rather think that's a liability risk?
The answer started with, and I quote: "not a problem". My employer did request advance warning (they expected me to actually have such plans it seems; I clarified afterwards this was completely hypothetical for a HN comment) such that, in case it's controversial, they can warn the competitor ahead of time and say it's just my private opinion, but that's just a request and sounds reasonable to me.