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Housekeepers now sign NDAs
For decades, non-disclosure agreements were mostly a business tool, meant to keep employees from spilling company secrets. They have since become a go-to tool in the everyday lives of the wealthy.
The managing partner of one Connecticut law firm has watched inquiries about NDAs easily increase a hundredfold over the past 10 years. One driver is that it has never been easier to snap a photo and post something online, and the internet makes secrets hard to keep.
The documents have grown to match. At a staffing agency that specializes in placing nannies and other household workers, contracts that used to be a simple paragraph can now run 15 pages.
NDAs are spreading through government too. The Trump administration wants current federal employees and new hires to sign them to prevent leaks to news outlets, and a few years ago the Supreme Court started pushing clerks and other employees to agree to them as well.
Why do courts sometimes refuse to enforce NDAs?
A contract can be thrown out when enforcing it would violate public policy, and courts have declined to uphold NDAs that were written so broadly they silenced lawful speech. Agreements meant to hide unlawful conduct face the same problem. In the United States, the Speak Out Act, signed in December 2022, bars the enforcement of NDAs signed before a dispute arises in cases of sexual harassment or assault.
How did phone cameras change privacy?
Camera phones first reached consumers in Japan around 2000, and the iPhone arrived in 2007 with a camera and a constant internet connection. That combination meant a photo could leave a private home within seconds. Instagram launched in 2010 and gained its first million users in roughly two months.
How did NDAs become standard in business?
Confidentiality clauses spread through employment contracts as companies in fields such as electronics and pharmaceuticals tried to protect inventions from departing employees. They sit on top of trade secret law, which gives companies a separate way to go after leaks. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act, published in 1979, gave states a model law that most of them adopted in some form.
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