A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a "legal contract that limits the use and disclosure of confidential information between two or more parties."
In business, it's usually employed to protect trade secrets or projects in development.
An NDA in a personal relationship is also a legal contract.
It can be used to protect either party's reputation. It can be used to prevent the sharing of private data—such as photographs or messages—on social media.
NDAs can apply to both parties in a relationship or to only one party. These one party NDA's are often part of civil settlements.
In order to receive funds, the aggrieved party has to sign an NDA promising not to disclose the conduct that lead to the lawsuit.
Reddit user iam_saikat asked:
"People who are no longer bound by NDAs, what are some surprising secrets that you can expose?"
Probably Sold As Made In The USA
"Worked for a packaging company and we got a job shipping American flags. The flags were manufactured in China, and legally it had to have a big 'made in China' stamped on the plastic packaging."
"So the company just double wrapped the flags, with the printed 'made in China' on the outside bag. When it got to us we were told to remove the outer plastic with the words on it and then package and ship the flags like normal."
"The company didn’t want customers to know their flags had been made overseas. Maybe not the most scandalous thing, but it did create a ton of extra labor for us, plus the excess plastic waste was ridiculous."
"A few days in, management told us we were no longer allowed to ball up the plastic when tossing it. The balled plastic would expand in the trash cans and it would become impossible to pull the trash bags out of the bins by the end of the work day."
~ KazGem
Image Over Integrity
"I briefly worked at a university in South Florida in the late 90's and early 00's. I was chosen to be on an Academic Integrity team, basically reviewing claims of plagiarism and cheating and deciding between the five of us whether it is valid or not."
"We were made to sign NDA's when we accepted the invite to be a part of the team."
"There were three instances where an employee that was taking classes there clearly cheated, and the issue was brought to our attention. Those three times, the cheating was blatant."
"All three times, we were told to let it go, as it would look bad for the university to have it get out."
"I'm not sure if this is common for other universities, but at the time, I was under the impression that it was common practice everywhere."
"It was ultimately one of the main reasons I ended up quitting. I was and still am disgusted by it."
~ hellhound28
Statistics Are Easily Altered
"Manipulation of Data to give false impressions of reliability was something I saw quite blatantly utilised with little repercussions."
"My company was struggling to meet on time delivery schedules and for numerous years was as embarrassingly low as 40%... A new manager comes in and within months we are now boasting an on time delivery rate on a brilliant 95%."
"Turns out all he did was change what constituted an on-time delivery: each time we knew a product would be late, we'd notify the customer of the delay and ask them to confirm they still wanted the order; if they still wanted the product, the on time delivery would be recorded against the new expected date as opposed to the original promised date."
"Company literature was being sent out boasting of our 95% on time delivery (now amongst the highest in the industry) when in fact we were by that point meeting less than 30% of initial delivery schedule targets."
"It was so simple that I'm sure numerous companies are getting away with such underhanded tricks."
~ BarraDoner
Uncharitable
"I worked at a cancer charity and half the people would order things for themselves and charge it to the charity. An eye-opening job for a 16-year-old."
~ redpaloverde
"A family member worked at one of the big accounting firms. They were auditing a very well-known charity and found instances of them using program money to buy expensive stuff for staff members."
"The accounting firm walked off the job. This is apparently very common."
"When you hear of a company or organization losing their accounting firm, it's probably because something was found that wasn't totally kosher, and the firm didn't want to get all wrapped up in the controversy."
~ AmericanScream
Play Dumb
"Worked in technical customer support for a IT/hardware company. We were sold a bad batch of chips from a supplier."
"The chips caused random 'watchdog' resets which would cause random crashes/reboots. The company got a settlement due to it to remediate it, but the MBA/legal types deemed it too expensive to fix what was already in the field so they 'fixed it in Support'."
"We had very strict talking points when our customers would report this issue, everyone in the support team knew what the issue was and had each worked several cases of it, but our 'script' made us act stupid like it was a unique case that had never happened before."
"It is kind of hard to do that when you have replaced multiple units for the exact same customer in several weeks, but if you diverted from the talking points, you got counseled by management."
"This issue caused several very high level outages/issues at many of our customers, we knew why, and we were told to 'act dumb' and bury it in process/procedures so we didn't take the hit on needing to replace the known faulty hardware."
~ labratnc
Tech Illiterate
"About 20 years ago I signed an NDA with a very large record company regarding their attempts to get into selling their catalogue online. Streaming , sales , etc... It was a minefield because they were still wary of pissing off high street retailers, and that's where the charts came from."
"These attempts were frustrated by their top-level corporate guys. One week they all went to a 'what is an MP3' conference in Buenos Aires to get them up to speed."
"The thing is, they spent so much time partying, and the only talk that seemed to stick was about the scare tactics about how teens could scrape MP3s from the web and copy and redistribute them easily."
"When they came back every item in the catalogue was ordered to be scrubbed from the web. No 30 second previews , nothing should be audible. Not a hint of audio. Lock it all down. Put all the tapes in a chest and seal it with concrete at the bottom of the sea."
"Like, that's gonna make everyone go back to buying CDs. Good old profitable CDs."
"The hilarious thing was all their current releases were on a big set of shelves, and visitors were invited to take whatever they liked. I'd then take them back to my office and rip them all."
~ this-guy-
Behind The Scenes
"I've seen an early cut of John Wick 2 where all of the animal handlers were running around on screen in green spandex bodysuits. Running alongside the horses, carrying leads for the dogs, etc..."
"Just all of these people who are invisible to the actors and the rest of their world."
"Absolutely surreal."
~ TheFoxAndTheRaven
Made In Myanmar
"Early 2000s, I worked in the clothing department at Walmart, and one night I was handed a memo that I was to secretly cut out all the tags on a list of products from a clothing brand—not one of Walmart's own—that said 'Made in Myanmar' because a brand was suddenly trying to hide that they were doing business there."
"Not a total surprise, but it seemed odd to me at the time that I would get a memo from corporate at like 8pm MST that I needed to do this task immediately."
~ FaeShroom
Like Battleship
"Hasbro has tried to make the following two films:"
"Stretch Armstrong: a gritty re-imagining starring Taylor Lautner (the wolf from Twilight) with a 'Nolan's Batman' feel."
"CandyLand: A Lord Of The Rings style epic for children starring Adam Sandler."
"Both got pitch packets made before ultimately being shelved. Last I heard, the Candyland idea is still kind of alive."
~ Cloberella
Exploitation Of Imagination
"Intel Corporation used to go around to colleges and hold programming contests, and to the winner they'd give a mid-grade laptop and a gaudy trophy."
"Back at Corporate, some of these winning code bases would get tens of millions of dollars poured into them in attempts to get them to product release."
~ theuniversalsquid
"I heard that a lot of companies do this; they go around to high schools, colleges and universities and hold contests, but it's written into the fine print that the company takes possession of the contestants intellectual property..."
"By doing this they can poach potentially profitable ideas from students for the price of a trophy and/or a one off cash prize, take it to market themselves and make millions, or more often simply bury any innovations that could be a threat to their company in the future."
"If you ever see a feel good story about a teen genius that wins a science fair with a groundbreaking invention be sure to make a note of it in the back of your mind, because there's a high chance that you'll never hear about it ever again."
~ QueenieMcGee
Liability First
"In Prince George's County Maryland, county transit bus drivers are instructed following an accident they are not to speak to anyone until a supervisor arrives on the scene. An approved method for not talking, especially to other drivers involved, is to feign injury."
"There's actually money allotted to pay the fines related to wasting 911 and emergency resources, because analysts determined it was cheaper than costs associated with drivers accidentally admitting fault."
"There's also an entire audit and analysis team related to accidents because of the sheer volume of people who falsely claim to be on a bus during an accident."
~ Sorripto
Rigged
"I worked for a website creation company back in 1999, managing the website for a big brand/large bank that was sponsoring a round-trip paid ticket to the Superbowl."
"I worked on the website that collected all the entries, and I posted the rules that the company's legal department wrote to describe the rules of the contest."
"A random winner was to be selected for the prize, and I wrote a software tool to randomly pick the winner to be used when the contest was over."
"When the contest ended, I was told to forget my tool, forget the rules, just look in the database and find someone in South Florida (where the Superbowl was in 1999) so the company wouldn't have to pay for airfare."
~ midnitewarrior
Try Turning It Off
"In a tech support role, one manager used to boast his team's average call-times were the lowest in the company. While average call times were in the 12-17 minute range, his team was constantly under 10 minutes."
"His team was awarded multiple times and his 'strategy' was adopted company-wide to all customer service and technical support teams, including our internal IT teams."
"That strategy was under a strict NDA, as we did not want to allow competitors to emulate it. When our call center would go bid on contracts, it became an awesome metric."
"'Our Customer Satisfaction Scores are on-par but we have call times 20-30% lower than our competitors!'."
"The dirty secret of the NDA that I was not allowed to disclose? Their 'big method'?"
"Just hang up on people."
"Straight up."
"Find a way to say, 'Okay go ahead and do that and call back if it doesn't fix it'. Then hang up. Don't wait for confirmation. 'Okay, so, reboot your PC and your problem should be solved! Thanks for calling!' then 'click'."
"Eventually, the industry came out with more useful metrics that tracked things like First Call Resolution, which absolutely shredded this company, and they went out of business a year or two later."
~ gaqua
Corporate Welfare
"Walmart corporate office puts a screensaver on all their workers' computers with a message urging them to donate to an emergency fund for their full-time (FT) or near-FT warehouse and retail workers."
"Soliciting donations from other employees instead of Walmart giving them healthcare or PTO."
"Walmart retail and warehouse workers are kept just below FT so they can't get benefits, and the vast majority receive government benefits. Your taxes are subsidizing millions in benefits for the richest company in America so the richest CEO in America is richer."
"Everything in the second paragraph of this post is public knowledge."
~ BatFancy321go
$$ = Qualified
"The private school I worked for was for students identified with giftedness. The owner of the school administered the giftedness test."
"Can you pay the tuition? You're gifted! Can your sibling pay? Them too!Y our cousin? Neighbour? Kid you know across town? You're all gifted!"
~ Snuffy1717
What's a secret you know that was hidden behind an NDA?
@priscillachan/Instagram
