Ask HN: Worth it to violate a NDA? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Worth it to violate a NDA?

4 pointsdfraser9929 comments

Hi all,

Long story short: I was hired to build a website and somehow it turned into a B2B. I was effectively acting CTO for the 4 1/2 years I was there, so I know _everything_ - and I was the only IT person for most of that time.

Anyway, the founders turned out to be fundamentally criminals - the CEO flat out lied to a customer about the nature of the data they were going to get and the customer eventually figured it out. They threatened to sue, etc. When the attempt to gaslight the board of the customer failed, I got strong armed to actually the build the system to generate the data the customer wanted - I was owed $20k in invoices by then... (don't ask, my fault entirely) and if they had been sued, I would never get my money...

So I built it, contract saved, then I got forced out of the company (again, long story, lots of stress..) After the CEO sent me a email mocking me for quitting, I had a nervous breakdown.

A year later, I am still troubled by the whole thing. These people harmed not just me, but the sales guys and the other part time contractors who they yanked around. There is no reason to suspect they have changed their behavior, so they are a threat to everyone that they do business with.

The NDA I signed covers "business info" in a general way, but disclosure of criminal acts certainly is an exception. I can prove all my assertions as I was there and have the email trail. So what do I do? My comment history will show I've ranted about sociopaths, but now that I'm feeling much better in general, I still feel the need to do something based on professional ethics... These people, as I learned out later, have done business like this for the past 30 years - the guy who introduced me finally told me some stories - damn idiot...

thanks.

Legal contracts can't require or safeguard criminal behavior.

Although it never hurts to involve a lawyer, instead of relying on your own amateur interpretation of the contract and the law.

This is all downside. Let it go, move on with your life.

+1 for this. Sometimes you just have to move on, no matter how much you want to get back at someone.

One criteria I use is how much is my motives driven by emotion. If it boils down to "I want to see this person suffer.", its better to move on.

Your answer is in your question - disclosure of criminal acts certainly is an exception.

If the acts involved were immoral, but not criminal, then you'd have a quandary, but in this case, you may even find that not reporting their actions (depending on what they are/were) could come back to bite you.

I don't think you would be breaking and NDA... I am an NDA is not a cover for criminal activities...

What criminal act took place?

Negotiation in bad faith with the customer, though I ended up fixing that...

they deliberately breached my contract as well and treated everyone like shit (forcibly reinterpreting the sales guy's contracts to avoid paying them what they were owed, etc)

now that I think about it, these are more in the line of 'immoral' subject to civil penalties / civil suits as opposed to criminal acts against the public good, like dumping toxic waste...

so the general ethical quandary is 'to what extent am I responsible for not informing other who will be harmed by their actions?' The reason I ask is that the person who could have informed me, didn't, and so I ended up in this mess. I don't want that to happen to other people - I would have done it a year ago, but I was exhausted with everything.

Everyone before me has made the same decision, to not tell people... and so they have been getting away with this general stuff for 30 years. Back room gossip only goes so far and now they are loose in the IT community, thanks to me. I should have immediately quit when I was feeling the impulse.

Specifically regarding wage fraud, try the state labor board.

Yeah, you're going to have a hard time justifying breaching an NDA unless you yourself plan to file suit, in which case you wont have to breach your NDA.

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