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Comment by EvilTerran | Hacker News Reader

McDonald's wouldn't fire you for giving your friends burgers from your backyard grill, even if they all got food poisoning afterwards; while this business would fire you for doing anything resembling financial advice in your own time, even if nothing bad came of it to anyone.

It's the controlling attitude towards off-duty behaviour that strikes me as particularly insidious.

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A company needs to protect itself from things that could potentially be tied back to it, even indirectly. This is especially true for employees that are presented as representing the company even some of the time.

I work as a SQL Server DBA and occassionally publish articles about technical aspects of SQL. But anything that rises above the level of a comment like this one gets vetted by the company before I publish it. I am quite comfortable with this because I agreed to it ahead of time and I understand why the company wants the right to review.

"A company needs to protect itself from things that could potentially be tied back to it, even indirectly."

I don't think that this sort of lockdown is a good answer. The answer should be something more like going "what the heck is wrong with our system of lawsuits and liability that the company needs to be this paranoid about its risks?"

While true, a company cannot change the laws it operates under by itself and must take steps to protect its interests. In the US most of these laws are created to protect the consumer to the detriment of the company. It is what it is.

It seems to me that a company shouldn't be liable for anything an employee does outside of work unless there's evidence that the company specifically sanctioned such conduct.

In other words, the default should be "the opinions in this post are mine and mine alone..." for anything not explicitly done in the company's name.

I am not a lawyer, but I am inclined to agree with you. However, the analysis for whether an employee's actions trigger respondeat superior is more complicated than that, especially for employees where the work/life balance may not be entirely clear (this is frequently true of executives and may be true of anyone that ever does post/publish/or even speak on behalf of the company).

But even if it were clear that the employee's actions did not fall into the category, a company is rightly concerned about anything that would create even a colorable cause of action (in otherwords, anything someone could sue for without it being immediately thrown out).

Also, the company might be worried about the appearance in the public's eyes even when lawsuits are entirely off the table.

There's an interesting policy question here: how could the law be written such that people do not become restricted from their usual right to talk about their fields due to liability without giving companies too big a back door through which to avoid liability?

It would be fairly simple to construct a law that protects companies from liability for things their employees say, but what happens if an employee wants to say... give bad stock advice and pays an employee under the table to do so on his own time?

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