Non-disclosure agreements and an obsession with secrets

Religious leaders in the US entered into legally binding agreements not to talk in detail about their online worship collaboration with Facebook. And Amazon demanded that testers of a revealing body-scanning technology not reveal anything about the experience.

Non-disclosure agreements like these have become a fixture for many influential people and institutions that want to keep secrets, sometimes for understandable reasons and other times for horrifying ones. NDAs and similar legal agreements have been used to cover up sexual abuse and harassment and discrimination at work.

NDAs are definitely not confined to the tech industry. But the power of large technology companies and the popularity of their products make their attempts at enforced secrecy particularly dangerous because of the ways NDAs keep the public from fully understanding how these companies shape the world.

The use of NDAs, including in trivial or routine circumstances like visiting a tech office, is ironic in an industry that praises openness and transparency. Facebook says it values free expression, but it might stop you from talking about the grapes that you ate at the company cafeteria.

Yes, there are often good reasons for people and companies to demand confidentiality or try to prevent competitors from learning their best ideas. And because many people, including journalists, are eager to know about potential tech products or projects, there may be a higher risk of stuff leaking out of those companies.

But it’s also easy to find fault in the willingness of many technology companies to throw around NDAs like confetti, in both silly and unsettling ways. Ifeoma Ozoma, the former Pinterest public policy executive, is among those pressing to ban NDAs that limit people who experienced workplace discrimination from speaking publicly about their experiences. Some laws restrict NDAs if they keep sexual misconduct or dangerous products a secret.

If tech workers hadn’t risked breaking NDAs at their companies, the public might have never learned about fraud at the blood testing company Theranos, the emotional and physical health risks faced by those who review Facebook posts containing violence and sex, and details of Russian online propaganda to create voter chaos in the United States.

“The vast reach of these companies is what makes their use of exploitative agreements the biggest issue,” Ozoma said in an email. It might hurt other customers when Airbnb makes customers sign NDAs if they encounter bedbugs at rented homes, or when non-disclosure provisions limit customers from complaining publicly about their experiences with teeth aligners. And is it fair for Amazon and other companies to require elected officials to sign non-disclosure agreements about projects that use taxpayer dollars?

Companies and people have legitimate reasons to want to keep many of their secrets, but they could choose other legal means to do so, including confidentiality provisions, which are more limited in scope. When powerful and trendsetting tech companies use NDAs for everything and anything, it often protects them at the expense of the rest of us.

Ovide is a tech writer with NYT©2021

The New York Times