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It depends.

Much like everyone making a purchase online will 'agree to the terms and conditions' without reading them, many jobs get so many NDAs thrust at them that they'll sign without reading them.

If you repair office coffee machines for a living? You might visit 4 office buildings a day, and they'll all hand you a pile of paperwork telling you not to take photos, not to connect things to their computers, that you should evacuate if you hear the fire alarm, and so on. Hardly anybody reads such things before signing them.



> sign without reading them.

If you're actually signing, with signature, a legal document without reading it, you reap what you sow. Ticking a checkbox on a site is not the same legally binding agreement that an NDA is.


You seem to be under the misconception that people usually have the time to read those NDAs or the option not to sign them...


You cannot be coerced to sign a document under duress and have it be legally binding.


At minimum wage you'll be hard-pressed to convince a court you had no choice.


Courts don't make decisions based on your income.


How naive are you? You need a lawyer and pay for that lawyer. And time off to argue in court and handle all the details. Are you familiar with the constraints of minimum-wage workers?

Courts might as well make decisions based on income. Income and working conditions already filter out a lot of theoretical rights for the working poor before even getting a court date. And come to think of it, there are all sorts of examples where the income of plaintiffs or defendants even matter expressis verbis...


> Ticking a checkbox on a site is not the same legally binding agreement that an NDA is.

It’s not? I thought it was! (Not that it should be.)


IANAL but this is my understanding.

Sites that use "By using this service, you agree to X." do not hold up in court almost at all.

Sites that use "By checking this box, you agree to X." there is some semblance of a binding agreement but there's a lot of wiggle-room in court. User doesn't understand, wasn't made clear, wasn't actually the user, etc. can all be argued.

Sites where you sign your name in some way, shape or form, tend to be treated more fortified - a la Docusign, which employs an extensive set of protections against forgery and cases of misunderstanding. These cases probably couldn't be argued in court on the premise of sort of 'unintentional' agreement like the prior two could be.

This of course extends to written documents.

Unless you're signing NDAs with a checkbox (which would be kind of reckless on the issuer's part), then NDAs hold much more weight in court in most cases as there is very little ambiguity as to whether or not the signee actually meant to sign it.




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