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Comment by db65edfc7996 | Hacker News Reader

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but how does that work for mega-huge companies? Microsoft/Visa/Google/etc likely have deals with everyone. If you work for a large company, you could essentially never disclose anything, regardless of the source.

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Here's a rule of thumb that will work for you, no matter how large a company you work for or how you got the material or what agreements they have in place: if it's not explicitly public material you should not disclose it.

> if it's not explicitly public material you should not disclose it.

By definition anything you can get to independently is public material, as you are the public.

Can you please argue this in a court of law? I will gladly supply the popcorn.

Public Material is the material the Company chose to make Public.

Many legal terms are different from their definition in OED.

That means if something is published in the NYT but the company didn't explicitly ask NYT to publish it, you have to treat it as private. This makes zero sense. And I want to see somebody try to win a legal case based on the theory that something published in NYT is not "public" because they didn't "choose" to make it public.

You've shifted the context to argue a nonsense point.

If NYT published info, and that's how you became aware of it, yes, it's Public.

But that was not the context I was replying to. My reply is in the context an individual employee making private information public.

A journalist informing GenPop of data is very different than an employee leaking.

Talk to your contracts or securities council for the details - scope and context are important.

Many government contractors couldn’t legally read the Snowden papers despite them being published in newspapers because they weren’t declassified.

Classified info has different rules. The government never plays by the same rules as mere plebes.

Sure, but the parent comment said “explicitly public” which means information that satisfies both these criteria:

- you can get to it as the public

- the owner of the information considers it to be public (this is the “explicitly” part)

That's wrong. The crucial part is that it should apply to any random person, not just you. E.g. if it's published in a newspaper, or broadcast on a news channel, which anybody could watch, then it's public. If somebody told you, and only you, it's not public, because any random person couldn't get the same information.

The general policy at such companies is "don't disclose anything except what's on the website or in press releases without going through official channels"

If you're gonna post that sort of stuff you're going to have to do it anonymously. There are all kinds of NDA stuff about 3rd parties, customers, partner companies in every NDA I've ever seen. That's just life and a lot of the time life does not care about your morals or beliefs or opinions.

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