Non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, are legally binding contracts that establish confidential relationships.
For most people, it’s not a big deal. NDAs are often signed at the start or end of an employment opportunity or during a sale of a product or technology you own. They mainly protect creative, business, or intellectual properties.
However, another function of NDAs is to guarantee silence on more high profile or nefarious events. For example, Stormy Daniels was asked to sign an NDA so that events that transpired between her and former president, Donald Trump, would be kept a secret. In most cases like these, the person who signs the NDA also gets a sum of money for their cooperation.
In these cases, the reason for the NDA is usually wild.
Curious about these wild reasons, Redditor gabz09 asked:
“People no longer bound by their non-disclosure agreements, what can you now disclose?”
That Didn't Work Out
"I disclosed to a minority partner that the majority partner owed him 100k. He could have easily received a check for that amount, but he sued for 700k, spent 300k on a lawyer and got nothing."
– Jt3151
"Ha...I saw the owner of a company I worked for do the same thing. A sales employee sued for not getting proper commissions and the CEO easily paid 10 times that amount fighting it in court...only to lose and have to pay anyways. Spite!
– katpurz
Threatening Exposure
"Not me but my cousin. He was working his first job in Marketing in one of the top marketing firms in the country. My cousin is ridiculously good looking, used to be a model for A&F( not just the local store models, but one of the national models) and dresses well. So he get to the job and his bosses boss (male) starts hitting on him ridiculously. He's invited to lunch, dinner asked if he wants to go to the bosses weekend home, all the time turning him down. One time in the car his boss told him how quickly he would advance if he spent the weekend with him, and my cousin recorded the entire conversation. He nopes the boss and then ghost him on invites for weeks until the boss stops asking. Fast forward to three months after he's hired and he's doing his review with HR and his immediate supervisor is there. He starts to hear about how he's not a good fit, not a team player etc."
"They let him know they were terminating him, and he grabbed the paperwork they wanted him to sign and put it in his pocket. Then he pulled out his phone and played his bosses recording. After he was done, he looked at the HR manager and asked if she had anything to say. They both left the room acting shell shocked and he stayed there in the conferoom until the HR manager came back an hour later. She put her boss on the conference line and they started telling him it was illegal to record private conversations, they would file charges etc. He laughed and told them he would go to the press, and that he knows they would love to put him on TV. Three days later he as signing a nondisclosure and picking up a check almost big enough to pay for his three years of law school. For anyone wondering, no the guy who harassed him was not fired, and he has since been promoted again by the company."
– tennkinkster
Don't Believe Everything You Read
"The book you're reading might only be a "bestseller" because the author had enough money to buy thousands and thousands of copies, have them shipped to a warehouse for storage, and eventually destroyed."
– mattzees
"Always wondered how sh*tty books were on the NYTBSL and who was buying them..."
– leavemealone0
"Given the fact that a book I'm reading right now is labeled as a "Bestseller" reads like a sixth grader wrote it, I wouldn't be surprised"
– IWantFries21
This Is How Games Fall Apart
"Technically, I'm still bound by the NDA, but the company didn't know how to write NDAs. It's like they had the following conversation:"
"LEGAL"
"Hey, we need an NDA just like all these other companies have!"
"PUBLISHER"
"Do you know how to write an NDA?"
"LEGAL"
"No."
"The NDA was for a roleplaying game that I signed up to playtest with the group. The NDA itself actually forbade me -- the person running the game and providing feedback to the company -- from talking about it, but had no such restrictions in place for anyone I ran the game for. It only required me to sign it, not any of my players. The way it was written, I was not allowed to play the game with any of the players in the group. How they expected anyone to playtest the game, I don't know."
"The way that RPG playtests are supposed to happen is:"
- "the company releases a playtest document,"
- "people play it, and then"
- "they make changes for another round of playtesting."
"What actually happened is the company changed the core resolution mechanic of the game in the middle of the first round of testing (in the middle of a long message forum thread), based on the feedback of people who were openly admitting they only read the rules and hadn't actually played the game."
"One of the people who stated they hadn't played the game also said he didn't have a group of players they were going to play it with."
"So they changed the game based on nothing but feedback from people who hadn't tested anything."
"To top it off, after my group actually played the game and submitted feedback we weren't invited back to the second round of playtesting."
"Also we were left off the playtest credits."
– Cartoonlad
This Is Disappointing
"I worked at a small bakery in New York City when I was younger. Every morning the bakery would take their day old cup cakes and deliver them to a tour company that did Sex and the City tours. The tour company would pass our cupcakes off as cupcakes from Magnolia, and significantly much more popular bakery."
– neverherebefore
The Secret Has Been Revealed
"The secret ingredient in Jimmy John’s tuna salad is Kikkoman’s Soy Sauce"
– No7an
"I make my tuna with soy sauce now. I only worked there for a short time, so I was never allowed to make the tuna. But a friend that worked with me told me the recipe. They’re funny with their NDAs."
– Deleted User
My Pretzels Shall Be The Same!
"When i was fired from Auntie Anne's in 2010, I signed a 10 year non-compete/NDA contract, promising not to detail the baking secrets or work for another pretzel establishment."
"Well that ended this year so now I can run out and start a pretzel store because the secret I was keeping was making pretzels literally requires 2 products, one of them being water and the other a large bag of pretzel meal/dust/powder. Quite literally anyone with $2500 can start a pretzel stand and make perfectly fine pretzels, it's not difficult whatsoever."
"Edit: I signed the letter when I was hired but I got a copy with my termination letter."
– ThatBankTeller
It Could Be Worse
"I used to work for a large gas station chain."
"I worked at its warehouse where it creates a lot of the donuts. The room was really hot so we were always sweating. There’s some machines where the donuts get glazed in chocolate. They’re these small machines they look almost like a bbq grill. They always wanted us to be super fast glazing the donuts. Working in a hot room and working at super fast speeds it was natural for a lot of peoples sweat to just drip in the chocolate underneath us. Never eat the chocolate donuts from a gas station"
– Opti-Free31
"Honestly if the worst thing in those donuts is human sweat, I'm impressed."
– FloobLord
Knowledge Should Be Shared
"I was a contractor for NASA. I still fully support the agency, but I was extremely bugged when I learned that each separate NASA center (e.g., JPL, Kennedy, Ames, Goddard) hides many of its inventions and breakthroughs from the other centers so that when HQ is ready to assign a big mission (and a lot of dollars) to one center, they have a better chance to compete over the others. “Look what we invented! Ames can’t do this over there! Give us the next moon orbiter!”"
"The downside is that there is a ton of reinvention and duplicated efforts going on. Sometimes years of work go down the drain when another center does the same thing faster. My perspective was: you all work for NASA. Share knowledge, collaborate. I was frequently ordered to tone down anything revealing when speaking to other centers."
– DrunkThrowsMcBrady
Reasons To Stop Eating Out
"We re-used buffet style food served in a cafeteria that we're supposed to compost and record as waste. The health inspector says anything that's left open buffet style and serve yourself can't be taken back and repurposed because it's not monitored and could be cross contaminated or many other things (nobody should ever eat buffet style if avoidable fyi) but the fortune 500 company I worked for was unhappy about the money they were losing by composting the food so they make us keep it and re-serve it later or repurpose it into soup or casserole or something. Personally I never did this and just waited for my boss to leave and compost the food but others I worked with were too worried about losing their jobs to go against orders."
Let's Go To The Movies
"I was on a preview panel for Sony's "The Interview" film and it came up as a random task through a portal I was on. The NDA was basicly not to disclose the contents of footage we seen or replicate it until release. For some reason they allowed us to see each other's responses, so if you agreed with someone else and did not want to type in same thing, you just added to theirs."
"And here is where the fun begins :) . Sony asked us only about how a) sympathetic and relatable main characters were, b) was the film funny in a tasteful way and c) was it horribly racist and insensitive to people living under a dictator. As you might have expected - answers were all long ranty critiques or pure wtf!? and I mostly picked those others made as had nothing to add. Characters were shite, plot was shite, whole film was shite. The whole panel was 300 people but I know they repeated it thrice in UK. We were the last one."
"You all know what happened few days after that - Sony had a dubious security breach by evil, North Korean hackers. There was no hackers. It was their desperate marketing for when they finally re-release the film, someone will watch it."
"None of that is really secret but most do not mention those preview panels being just before their stunt."
– val-en-tin
Mouse Burger
"Technically the gag order was directed at my mom but she's dead now and I dgaf."
"The Burger King in Hendersonville, Tennessee had a MASSIVE mouse infestation in the mid 2000's. Management had begged corporate multiple times to pay for exterminators and massive repairs. They refused to justify the expense. The managers were told to buy mousetraps at the store using petty cash funds."
"A few employees took pictures of a mouse that had crawled into a bag of buns and died. When corporate found out, they fired everyone who'd worked that shift and hit them with gag orders forbidding anyone from sharing or discussing the mouse infestation."
"My mom was one of those staff members."
"The same branch also told their management to go ahead and sell chicken that had sat out at room temperature all night due to a broke freezer and tried to con an underage employee out of worker's comp for an injury by back-adjusting his clock out time."
"Seriously fuck Burger King."
– flyting1881
If The Shoe Fits
"I worked for a certain company that sells shoes and has been using a warehouse format for years. I worked for them just a little over a year and during that time, I learned quite a lot of the process you don’t want to think about."
"This company would buy shoes from other low prices retailers (not uncommon) however these shoes were not properly stored and workers were meant to sort through them, without proper protection, for mold, discoloring, signs of heavy use and whatnot. It was so bad that when the “good” shoes had been sorted out they left a horrid smell emitting from them for months and we were still told to sell them. Also any returned shoes that customers brought back that had been worn, were meant to get a “5 minute clean” so you could be buying a shoe that someone had worn multiple times and were just cleaned up. If someone asked why they looked that way. We were instructed to say that because customers grab their own size from the stacks, this one may have been tried on more often, but was still perfectly fine."
"Clearance shoes that could go as low as 75% off were drastically marked higher before going to clearance meaning that you were just paying full price."
"In my particular store, my entire system from computers to lights to being able to exit emergency entrances were due to faulty wiring that was always called out during code inspections yet “miraculously” disappeared during the retest when no work was ever done. My store also defaulted in rent payments several times and would send checks that bounced to landlords office."
"They also ran extensive background checks on all employees without any consent at all. Nobody ever signed documents and policy and procedure handbooks were never signed."
"Why did I end up having to sign an NDA?"
"Well they fired me and when I filed for unemployment they denied the claim. I lawyered up and because my team was confused about the whole situation, they risked there necks and sent documents, emails, phone logs, maintenance work logs, and so forth to me. I had an amazing lawyer that also found the docked pay for almost my entire district that was somehow ending up in our regionals pocket. It turned into this HUGE case, after all was said and done they paid me out so I got a decent amount to live on if I wanted. They could’ve saved so much money had they not started an internal investigation over employee theft that had no bounds at all. I hate this company so much with a passion."
– earthgoddess92
Such Ageism
"Bed Bath and Beyond forced me into an NDA concerning my separation. Ultimately, I was a manager, and they would not allow me to hire a 60 year-old woman because they believed she couldn't lift heavy boxes. This is a violation of employment law and discriminatory. When I chose to hire her, they relieved me of my job. I threatened to sue (my grad work is in employment discrimination). They immediately sent the home office HR to my store to offer me a settlement and an NDA. They basically told me if I didn't sign it, I would be fired anyway and I could take them to court where I would likely not get anywhere near as much as my settlement. I of course didn't have money for a legal retainer, so I didn't have any options."
– Sokapi84
The Opposite NDA
"When I was at school (20+ years ago) we had a whole school assembly where an established fruit drink brand (owned by one of the big drinks companies) came in and sold to us all for 30 minutes straight under the guise that we were a focus group and then made us watch 5-6 adverts for the drink so they could gather important feedback."
"We were told we were too young to sign non-disclosure agreements but they really hyped how super secret and special it was that we got to see these adverts and it we told anyone we had to be careful not to tell them everything because it is secret detail only for our specially chosen group."
"Of course we all went out and for a few weeks solid talked about this brand of drink and how awesome it was to anyone and everyone who would listen. We all got our parents to fill our fridges with it and I still to this day have some kind of bind with the brand that makes me feel warmly towards it and for years my "interesting thing about me" was that I have been in a focus group for this product."
"I later found out they ran these "focus groups" in literally every school in the country that would let them (paying a few hundred bucks to the school as a "focus group fee).""
"Absolutely incredible marketing ploy - no expensive TV adverts, goijg straight to the targwt market, making it exiting and bringing us into the brand family- telling us the adverts we watched were secret and subject to non disclosure to make us feel invested."
– zzady
Don't Be Rude To Those Who Handle Food
"I once worked at Popeyes in high school. We had a rude customer come through the dive thru one night right before we closed. My manager and another co worker had dropped the man's chicken on the floor ( it was covered in grease and outside shoe residue) and we all looked at each other and did the right thing... we gave him that chicken!! I regret nothing."
– Tiny_butterfly_farts
"I didn't want to be fired but felt morally obligated to not feed people food that was meant to be garbage, so I just sneaky tossed it out when nobody was looking because I got paid really well there. We all had to sign NDA's saying we wouldn't tell the media or non employees about recipes and procedures that covered leftover food and food waste. Eventually my boss discovered what I was doing and I stood up to him about not being willing to reuse garbage as food so we agreed that I'd just quit because while they could force me not to talk about it, they couldn't actually force me to do something illegal for my job and I was clearly refusing to do it."
– kb709
Some of these are even worse/funnier than I imagined.
We are all dying to know the juicy secrets behind something as controversial as a non-disclosure agreement. An entire world of information that we don't know--and, as humans are extremely curious creatures, we are simply absolutely on board with learning all of the juicy secrets behind an NDA.
The trouble is, NDAs are used on a lot of things. Sometimes they're just to prevent corporate espionage. Sometimes it's because you've booked a job onboard a major film/tv-series and the creators want to keep it under wraps.
Sometimes it is juicy though, and those times...well. Those are the ones we tell everybody.
"People no longer bound by their NDA, what can you now disclose?"
Here were some of the juiciest answers.
The Cola Wars
coca cola GIFGiphy"Not my own but from a family friend. Coca Cola and Pepsi regularily settle disputes behind closed doors on things like employees trying to quit and join the competitor."
"Their employment contracts have entire clauses stating you cannot be employed by the competing companies even after you quit so to protect company intel and confidentiality."
"For example, a Coca Cola employee feels like he is being mistreated by the company so he quits and tries to work for Pepsi."
"So Pepsi's legal team will inform Coca Cola as soon as they find out and Coca Cola will sue the guy for breach of contract and in return Pepsi will pay them."
"This is done so Pepsi and Coca Cola don't sue each others into bankruptcy for breach of laws regarding industrial competition and market regulations. Basically a peace treaty of sorts."-JazzPhobic
Behind The Mask, Who Are They?
"I was part of the beta testing for DC universe online. I remember a few missions that were voiced probably just by developers, before they hired the voice actors to do it."
"I wish I had saved footage of it but there was one where Supergirl was clearly voiced by a man doing a high-pitched falsetto voice. One of the funniest things I've ever seen."-DrumBxyThing
Hollywood For An Evening
"Not sure if I'm no longer bound or not or how common knowledge it is, but living in NYC I was paid to be a fan at a major red carpet movie premiere for a popular film franchise."
"100% of the people there were paid to act excited as famous actors and a VERY famous director walked out and said hello and did interviews. We were under strict instructions not to let anyone know we were hired."-LearnedToUnicycle
See? We told you--sometimes, it's just corporate America. But sometimes it's test runs of (now well-known or defunct) products:
A Good Idea In Theory
"Cheetos Clean Paws. I worked in market research and Frito-Lay tested these back in 2007, I think. The concept was Cheetos that didn't leave orange dust on your fingers."
"What that translates to is Cheetos with an edible lacquer sprayed on them. But they tested very poorly because they tasted like they had edible lacquer sprayed on them."
"My coworkers and I referred to them as semi-gloss Cheetos."-darkisright
No More Drama
"I signed an NDA for a predominant American show where they take a certain type of business on the brink of failure and 'transform it' to save the business."
"When the producers of the show found out my wife and I both worked there, they tried to fish through our relationship for tv drama."
"When they found out we have a solid relationship, they tried to convince us to fake our drama with scripted conflict. Long story short, we got fed up and quit during shooting. We were cut from the show. Oh well."-unholyXwater
Hollywood Conspiracy Come To Life
"I used to work for a company that tracked ticket sales for theaters across the US. By contractual agreement with Hollywood studios, we collected information for approximately 80% of theaters, but we were not allowed to collect that last 20%. Why?"
"You may have heard of Hollywood accounting. Hollywood studios work very, very hard to ensure their accounting is as beneficial to the studios as possible. No surprise; all businesses do this."
"But Hollywood has unusually high amounts of money in very narrow products, creating a distorted market. And the industry is rife with films grossing obscene amounts of money but not reporting a profit."
"Because our company couldn't collect that last 20% of theater data, it wasn't possible to absolutely say that a movie made X number of dollars."
"So, I can't prove it, but ...On Friday, June 21st, 2002, the movies "Minority Report" and "Lilo and Stitch" were both released to great fanfare."
"Minority Report's opening weekend was reported at $35,677,125 (27.0% of total gross)."
"Lilo and Stitch's opening weekend was reported as $35,260,212 (24.2% of total gross)."
"This is a lie. Lilo and Stitch earned more money than Minority Report its opening weekend. 20th Century Fox couldn't have a Tom Cruise feature film being beaten by a f**king cartoon."
"So someone at 20th Century Fox called Disney and offered a deal. Since the full amount of money earned couldn't be proven, Fox would announce that Minority Report was the top earner for the weekend. In exchange ..."
"We never knew what the exchange was. We simply knew that Minority Report was reported as the top earner and Disney received some benefit for not saying anything."-OvidPerl
Teachers Describe The One Student That They'll Never Forget | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
And They Say American Industry's Dead
"Used to work in a warehouse where we made feminine hygiene products. The pads came out of one machine into several different branded boxes. Both the nickel gas station pads and the 10 dollar a box pads."
"Also we had one product of pads where we imported them from china, then repackaged them into our own boxes. I didn't have a problem with that. The problem I had was the box had an emblem saying 'made in America.'"
"Would've been ok if it said assembled in America. But no."-GGATHELMIL
Studio deals, scripted drama, and failed products? What else can fall under an NDA? Let's find out:
Duck Soup
"Used to work for Disney. They only used Disney employees for the test screenings of Marvel movies so I got to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (already great) and an early version of Doctor Strange that needed A LOT of work."
"When we were giving feedback to the moderator the writers were sitting in the back with their heads in their hands looking very defeated."
"It was a confusing mess but they fleshed out the characters more so it was better by the time it was released. Oh also they used to kill a lot of ducks with pyro at Disney World when they did the IllumiNations show at Epcot. Shhhhh."-meany_beany
Doggos Deserving Better
"Adogo is a doggy daycare in Minnesota that made me sign an NDA for two years saying I was not allowed to talk about the company mainly, sadly, because they treat the workers and dogs like sh*t."
"No care for how many dogs were packed into a room, which is both unsafe for the dogs and the dog attendant. Often I'd be alone in a small room with up to 25+ dogs, most who only had the most minor of behavioral tests done to see if they would play well in daycare."
"Owner also tried to get around not paying my worker's comp when I did get injured on the job, and whenever anybody put in their two weeks after realizing what a toxic work environment it was (which was often) he would punish them with scheduling them all week or make them open to close 12 hours for all their shifts."
"If you're in Minnesota and looking for a reputable dog daycare: STAY AWAY FROM ADOGO. If in the Twin Cities I would recommend Dog Days, not perfect, but they actually seem to care."-Gday613
The Bee Problem
"I used to work in a call center that had Bayer Advanced (yes, THAT Bayer) as a client. Bayer knew/knows full well that their neonicotinoid based pesticide/gardening products killed bees and were responsible for colony collapse."
"We were instructed to bold face deny and/or lie to the customer or caller if we were ever asked about it. We were also instructed to lie about the spray nozzles on the bottles."
"Bayer knew they sucked and were almost always completely DOA defective, but they refused to admit it and decided it was cheaper to just keep mailing replacement nozzles."-wizardswrath00
Everything from a doggy day-care to an evil corporate overlord who knew full well their product was harming the earth can be covered under an NDA. The lack of specificity of what an NDA can be used for, in part, is responsible for this; the other part is the human beings can really be a little scummy.
In the instances where the NDA protects the integrity of a working project, we see the (likely) original intended use. Are you under any NDAs right now? And when they're up, will you go on and spill all those secrets?
Keeping secrets can be super hard to do. Especially when it comes to the workplace. Non-Disclosure Agreements are meant to keep company secrets, but every contract has an expiration date. Who knows what will be revealed?
tinyman1199 asked: People who have signed NDAs that have now expired or for whatever reason are no longer valid. What couldn't you tell us but now can?