Nondisclosure agreements were once largely confined to the corporate world—they provided a way to prevent company secrets from getting into the wrong hands. Now NDAs are everywhere. Read this juicy story from Reeves Weideman to understand just how much these legal documents have become a part of many people’s everyday existence. We’re talking celebrities, yes, but as one of Weideman’s sources puts it, NDAs are also pro forma for “small-market newscasters, or hedge bros, [or] a medium-tier meteorologist”:
While NDAs were originally reserved for executives or employees with access to proprietary technical or financial information, the paperwork has flowed down the org chart. “They used to be confined to pretty rarefied worlds, and now you see companies imposing these on janitors,” Jodi Short, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said. This spring, I found job listings that required an NDA to work as a forklift driver in Virginia, an e-commerce associate at Island Beach Gear on the Jersey shore, and a “meat cutter” at a biltong shop in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. The NDA is now a part of many job hunts—some companies require it in order to come in for an interview—and a meme went around TikTok that the document could be used to explain any gaps in your résumé: “Sorry, I signed an NDA.”
The next frontier for companies was to extend the web of secrecy to their customers. This year, a plastic surgeon in Seattle was found to have made more than 10,000 patients sign an NDA before their procedures that prohibited them from posting a “negative review,” which was defined as anything less than four stars. Julie Macfarlane, an emerita professor of law in Ontario and the co-founder of Can’t Buy My Silence, an organization that advocates for the regulation of NDAs, told me companies often use them to keep the public from learning about bad things they have done. “The first case in which a parent was compensated because of the impact of tainted baby formula was years before anyone knew about it,” Macfarlane said.
But even this consumer-facing use has expanded. Companies now deploy NDAs to conceal their own generosity. In April, I spoke to a man I’ll call Paul, a pseudonym he requested I use to avoid jeopardizing his status as a member of Marriott’s Ambassador Elite program. Paul is 37, works in real estate in Hong Kong, and travels a lot. He achieved his Ambassador Elite status by spending a hundred nights in Marriott hotels last year. Over Easter, when Paul checked in to the Royalton Chic Cancún, a Marriott on the beach, the receptionist greeted him with good news: a free upgrade! But there was a catch. The receptionist slid a piece of paper across the desk. Paul would need to promise not to brag about his upgrade at the pool bar. The NDA didn’t look very legal. It was half a page long, and the last words, in bold below the signature line, were “Please, have an amazing vacation.”
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