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Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
CuriositiesMAY 29, 2022

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets

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To be ahead of their game, businesses must do everything to keep working projects, innovative ideas, or exciting new products out of the hands of a competitor. But there may also be more sinister reasons why companies keep things under blankets.
And whatever the reason, very often, an NDA comes into play. An NDA (non-disclosure agreement), also known as a a ‘confidentiality clause,’ is a legal and binding contract between parties that keeps the lid on what a company holds as sensitive information. You may be given one as part of an employment contract to protect company secrets or after a dispute to keep details confidential.
Recently, a person who goes by the handle u/The-Christine-X asked those whose NDAs have finally expired “What secret can you finally reveal?” on Ask Reddit. The thread soon turned into a spilled pond full of corporate secrets floating in broad daylight. Psst! More stories from people with expired NDAs can be found in our previous feature right here.

#1

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
If you are ever with an elderly loved one and they get a Medicare call, hang up, hang up right away. I worked at a company in downtown Chicago this last year that were absolute slime balls.
All these young agents scamming old people, promising something about this “new upgrade” to their insurance when really they were just taking them off their plan. A lot of these people have Alzheimer’s disease and we’d get POAs calling in saying that we took their mother/father/aunt off a plan and now they can’t get back on their plan for an entire year.
I finally quit because it was so horrific what we had to do to our elders to get a pay check. I personally tried to do everything I could to not be slimy but at the end of the day the whole job was f****d. I took a man off his plan and was going to have him start a new one the following month. He didn’t have his medication list on him so told me he would email it to me. He finally emails me a list of it least 20 medications, one of his medications that was covered for like 20 bucks on his plan would literally go up thousands of dollars on the plan I put him on. I called him back and spent two hours canceling what we had signed him up on. I still feel horrible to this day. Imagine if he forgot to send me that list of medication.
Listen to me, as a past Medicare advisor, do NOT let your parents/grandparents take these calls. Medicare advantage plans are f****d and Medicare advisors are 20 sum year
Old kids who will do anything to get them taken off their plan.
265points

#2

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
That Facebook is every bit as horrible as people think it is. What struck me most is the culture of silence there. You cannot talk openly about concerns of the effects of Facebook as an engineer without vague references of it showing up in performance reviews. Perhaps people have a more comic book style evil corporation in mind but in Facebook coercion happens with performance reviews, strict metrics chasing, and not talking about the broader implications of those metrics. Take for example chasing the average session length metric, ie how long you’re likely to stay on Facebook at any given time. Seems innocuous at first until you realize this is where radicalization and spread of misinformation happens. Because as it happens what keeps peoples attentions the most effectively is sensational posts and polarizing posts targeting peoples outrage. Not only does this give you a skewed view of the world, but it rewards the people spreading misinformation and rage bait. It’s not that Facebook inherently plans to maximize peoples outrage, it’s just their metrics chasing makes them the most money by finding these patterns. Then like I said, it’s awfully convenient to just stay silent and count the cash. It’s the pinnacle (in my experience) of the banality of evil
236points

#3

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I worked for a company that did screenprinting and engraving, and one of their biggest clients was the US military. They bought EVERYTHING from China. They had a person who would cut out the "Made in China" tags, and replace them with "Made in USA" tags.
220points

#4

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Never open a document with DocuSign on your phone, we took ever piece of data we could get our hands on.
203points

#5

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Even if you walk away with nothing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you still get money for doing the show.
Report
179points

#6

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
When a pharmacy's stock of medication expires, they can't just throw it away. So they hire pharmaceutical waste disposal companies to take it away and dispose of it properly.
The "pharmacy" I worked for bought expired medication and supplies under the table from one of these disposal companies and resold them at full price.
EDIT: Naming and shaming would be complicated because the business operated under a constantly changing chain of mail-order pharmacies. When insurance companies would get enough complaints about one they would deny coverage, at which point patients would be shuffled to another pharmacy in the chain while the impacted pharmacy quietly closed and reopened under a new name.
The good news: they were busted and folded pretty quickly under the weight of having to operate like an honest pharmacy. Company in question is no more.
173points

#7

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Used to work for Billy Joel and he did start the fire. It was all a lie. It wasn't burning since the worlds been turning, it started when he drunkenly knocked a candle onto shag carpeting.
169points

#8

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
The big financial houses in NYC knew about the impending crash at least 6 months before it started in 2007.
I was at an investment conference when I heard the heavy-hitters discussing it before going on stage. I will never forget the sentence:
“What do we do? Go out there and tell them we are all f****d?”
They proceeded to go out there and peddle their “everything is great!” b******t.
I had never heard the word “tranche” before that day.
158points

#9

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Part of Amazon's associate training is literally how to lie when asked certain questions, and there was a "social" part of the contract that discouraged speaking poorly about Amazon with friends and on social media.
156points

#10

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Worked for an online gambling site. No matter how much you win or lose, the site always wins, and the odds are absolutely rigged. Also, the accounts of obvious addicts have to be banned (by law), but no one really cares if that person then just creates another account.
140points

#11

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Worked for a company that built hip implants. Some of them were custom, made-to-order based on CAT scans. The quality of the modeling was dubious and we had several fabs where the implant bent in the patient. The company always blamed the patient for "putting on too much weight". The company was also paying back physicians for ordering their 'custom' implants which were obviously more expensive than the standard ones (paid by public insurance). I quit the week I found this out. And I only knew the bare minimum of one case.
This activity led to a legal case of fraud and ... other stuff. People (doctors, administrators of the company) went to jail or were fined. Somewhere in that process (and I still can't talk about some of the details) I signed multiple NDAs with a health agency covering lack of oversight and relevant communications. This was a clusterfck on all levels - graft, corruption, material choices, medical controls. No one died, but the medical quality of services I was involved in was severely affected and decades later it still bothers me. Lesson learned, keep an eye on regulatory aspects of your businesses.
134points

#12

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I work in finance.
The computer does not tell me your rates.
Your rates are determined by my mood that day and whether or not you complimented my shirt
128points

#13

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
During my geology PhD I visited the site of a proposed waste disposal site. A preliminary geophysical survey identified a strange anomaly, a deep linear feature trending to the south south west. Looked like a buried river valley. The site needed investigating for a environmental impact statement / report, part of the planning application. My access to the site and investigation included a NDA, I couldn't publish anything about it until after the rubbish dump was built and a 5 year Stay was put on my thesis (access was restricted to only a few people).
My PhD supervisor also thought the a anomaly was an ancient buried river valley, perhaps a few million years old. This is exactly what the people who wanted to build the rubbish dump wanted to hear, as they absolutely could not put a rubbish dump over or near a Karst feature (dissolved limestone). Contamination could leak into the ground water.
We drilled into the center of the anomaly in 2003, we encountered peat and gravels, then 40 meters of clayey lake sediments, then some more gravels, but then we found 65 meters of hard clay (in fact two layers of clay, 40 meters of orange clays and 25 meters of white clay). We hit limestone bedrock at 128.32 metres depth (33.3 metres below sea level).
The hard clays were left behind after the limestone dissolved. It was Karst. A type of Karst called a Pocket Deposit. They were also found in they UK, the clays were used to make pipes (pipe clay) and cheap pottery. They were around 15 million years old, judging by the fossil pollen and leaves they found.
By the time the Stay ended, the rubbish dump was built, close to the anomaly. Where is should not be.
118points

#14

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I worked for Equifax about 20 years ago. We were doing things with your data we weren't supposed to do. I know this is going to come as a great shock to a lot of people.
108points

#15

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I worked for a company that audited medical bills and looked for stuff that wasn't charged. If you were not billed for something they would try to collect on it and get a share of that. If you were billed for something and should not have been, well sucks to be you, moving on, no refunds.
100points

#16

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
When I worked for State IT, we weren't supposed to provide details of what hardware was being used or operating systems. In the nineties, I took on an old server, souped it up, and put Linux on it to run our networks. This was pretty radical at the time because everyone else was using something proprietary (Like Netware) and I was able to deliver services for free (email and samba) they were paying out the nose for.
The NDA wasn't about security. It was about keeping how much money they were wasting under wraps.
99points

#17

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I was working at a hospital as an Intern. There was a woman who had a brain Tumor a while a go. She got in for a check up, six months pregnant and having depression. The doctor thought he found a new Tumor so she had another brain operation. But there was no Tumor and they cut her head open for nothing. And after she woke up they didn’t tell her this, instead acted like they removed it successfully.
Edit: I made an internship at the hospital for a few months. I completely forgot that intern in the medical context means someone who wants to become a doctor and studied medicine.
99points

#18

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Marketing companies will hire Jr people, give them amazing titles, and then charge the client outstanding fees per position and pay those people Jr pay, pocketing everything as profit.
The time they charge on estimates is double what it actually takes.
88points

#19

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
I worked on the Walking Dead during college. I saw a ton of main and side characters die in my few seasons I worked on. They made us sign NDAs every day we worked on set.
86points

#20

Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
Chase Bank mortgage division uses outdated technology it bought for hundreds of millions of dollars from Quicken/Rocket Mortgage. It's a DOS based system that Quicken created around 20 years ago.
They also purposely handicap their sales people who work off commissions. To avoid paying out larger commissions if they are doing well, they will be pooled into recieving worse leads or put on special assignments that limit productivity. In worst case scenarios when a sales person finds a way to break the system and make more money than Chase planned to pay out they dig through the employee's chats or personal files to find reasons to terminate them.
Chase also promotes internally to inflate their number of higher level positions held by minorities. Sounds great on the surface, but they do so artificially. Typically positions are filled by recruiting /HR. But whenever they want to bump the numbers they open a position that only "inclusion" candidates can apply for. Inclusion Candidates are code for non-white or non-disabled. These positions are usually for low level management that is planned to be cut in the near future.
Oh! And they give blatant preferential treatment to employees with children to avoid lawsuits. They lost a big one a few years back over father's getting equal maternity leave time.
75points
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