• I didn’t sign for a weird thing.

    I was going to go on a first date when the guy asked me to sign an NDA. He was attempting to be a content creator on YouTube, tiktok, etc., and thought he needed to start “protecting his reputation”. I declined the date.

    • Funny story but that’s how the patent law works in Germany and I believe at least Japan aswell. I don’t know about other places but I wouldn’t be surprised if this applied to the majority of the industrialised world.

      If you come up with an idea that could be patented while employed, you must to tell your employer about it and offer it to them. In return, they must either register it themselves and give you an appropriate compensation or decline ownership of it; allowing you to register it yourself.

      Rationale behind that, if you work in i.e. IT and invent an IT-related thing after you’ve clocked out for the day, you probably wouldn’t have had the idea if you hadn’t spent the majority of your day working on the topic for a couple years.

      I think this is actually quite fair as, even if the company decides to keep it for themselves, it’d register, use, license and defend the patent for you (for a great cut of course).

      • I might have forgot it coming through the doors at work.

        Fuck that logic <3

        Edit: I’d guess the law was made by employers so the loopholes must be plenty to spin the compensation for low level staff enough to justify giving 1% or something from the patent revenue.

  • My current job tried to get me to sign one that would prohibit me both from discussing the content of the NDA, and had a noncompete rider that was extremely aggressive.

    I told them I wouldn’t sign it, and it was unenforceable in this state anyway, so they might as well drop it. They did, but the whole thing made me super leery of working here. Corporate bullshit all the way down.

  • Most of the NDAs I’ve signed were from Amazon. I was regularly recruited by the AWS UX team to test changes to their web console in exchange for gift cards. But it meant for a while that I was legally prohibited from telling people inane shit like, “they might add a ‘cluster’ column to the RDS database list.” Stop the presses!

  •  Zagorath   ( @Zagorath@aussie.zone ) 
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    237 months ago

    I don’t have anything very interesting. I’ve been under NDA for various game betas at various times. One of them I’m still technically not allowed to even say there was a beta for me to have been a part of. Namely, the Age of Empires 2 expansion “Return to Rome” which brought Age of Empires 1 gameplay and civs into a separate game mode of AoE2, which had a secret closed beta around January this year.

    It’s not quite an NDA, but as a temporary worker for the AEC and ECQ (my state and federal electoral commissions), I’ve been prohibited from expressing a political opinion in public. Exactly how that’s supposed to work I’m not sure. I’ve usually just taken it to mean I can’t comment political stuff on Facebook between the date I accept the role and the date after the election (Lemmy and previously Reddit being pseudonymous, I’ve never cared much about following the political neutrality requirements here). People who know my IRL know my politics, so if it comes up during that time I usually just say “I’m not actually allowed to talk about that” with a wink.

    • I’ve been prohibited from expressing a political opinion in public

      That doesn’t sound enforceable unless you’re an official representative of the company.

      • The AEC and ECQ are government bodies here in Australia, that regulate elections (AEC is the Australia Electoral Commission - the federal body - and the ECQ is the Electoral Commission of Queensland - the state body for Queensland’s elections).

        When you sign up to assist as a temporary worker (eg. election scrutineer, etc), you’re bound by very specific terms as an employee of the government.

        I once signed up to help out with our national census, which made me a temporary employee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics - the ABS. The terms in that agreement were similar to the above commenter’s experience, I reckon, as we were also required to be politically impartial in public (among other things).

      • Eh, when you’re literally performing the job of runnkng the election—giving people ballots and counting the results after—I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a requirement of maintaining an appearance of political neutrality.

  • Not really my own NDA, but kind of remarkable on its own. I discovered a number of people I know have been living according to witness protection. Apparently witness protection has recurring favored locations and the area is like Bellwood for Witsec. Funniest part is they all know each other and themselves have no idea half the time. It feels like that one joke with that one zoo that gets people in animal costumes to live as animals only to find out the whole zoo are animals.

  • Not that strange, but certainly fucking annoying: at universities it’s becoming more common to have “closed searches” for upper administrators like presidents, provosts, deans, etc. This is very much a labor/management thing, and historically (in the US) public universities have had open searches, where faculty and staff get to meet candidates, ask them questions, etc. Upper admins have taken over all decision making power in recent decades, but in the past few years they’ve even started preventing faculty/staff from even knowing who is applying to be their new uni president. Under pressure to do something about “the consent of the governed,” admins have “allowed” some faculty and staff to view interviews and things, but are forced to sign NDAs to do so.

    At public universities, using taxpayer money, promising large amounts of taxpayer money to some person. It’s stupid and annoying.