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Comment by thekevan | Hacker News Reader

So if you are under an NDA, does this violate it?

I guess the better question would be if you are under and NDA and using an online model, are you already violating it but does this violate it further?

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In the same way that using Gmail and Dropbox and iCloud and Notion violates it. (Which IANAL but for most NDAs would be not at all.)

I never had an NDA permit such usage.

Your NDAs prohibit emailing a colleague about the e.g. project, or discussing it in a Slack DM with the client, or tracking progress on it in JIRA? You have to do NDA’d work exclusively with local tools or end-to-end encryption? Those are some difficult NDAs!

We use inhouse on-premises email, issue tracking, and messaging. Depending on the project, external communication does require E2EE email. Development happens on local hardware and software unless required otherwise by the customer.

I’m pretty sure (even just based on the revenue of various SaaS products) that’s not typical, hence “most NDAs”. I’m also sure some require a SCIF, but that’s not most of them.

No this is still the level below needing a SCIF. The USG really tightened this stuff up in the 2010s and highly restricts what you can do with CUI. That's why there's a whole parallel FedRamp-compliant cloud ecosystem.

But in terms of how common it is, pretty much everybody in Fairfax County works in a company with rules like this; it's a big part of why the tech culture is so different than Austin or SFO.

Oh Lord yes. We have very specific communications channels we're allowed to use about any of our sensitive products, and that's only the unclassified stuff (classified is obviously its own, stricter, beast).

Google Workspaces and Dropbox have an IL5-compliant offering, which means they attest that they will not do exactly this (and are audited on that). Not sure about iCloud and Notion.

It depends on the NDA

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