Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.

Thu Sep 10 00:41:29 UTC 2015

>If your employer insists on attaching a legalistic signature to your
>email which warns the recipient that the message is for their eyes
>only... it's because you are not authorized to make public statements
>as an employee of the company.

No, that's not it.  A disclaimer "I don't speak for foocorp" is not at
all the same as "you have to keep this super sekrit foocorp message
confidential."

The disclaimers tend to be much shorter and are somewhat reasonable,
stating that this message does *not* constitute a contract.  As
explained at length, the confidentiality stuff purports to be a
contract but is not.  As I said it can be summarized as "I am stupid"
or "I am controlled by stupid."

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly