Can the confidentiality agreement be signed between
individuals?
Confidentiality
agreements are not only signed between organizations rather they can be signed
between individuals. There can be an individual signing a confidentiality
agreement with the organization in certain situations. The need of the
agreement always arises whenever an individual or a business has to understand
things done by a business in running its affairs. There can be secret processes
containing top secret information regarding production, sales, marketing and
other departments. It becomes important at times to give access to that
information to other parties in the agreement.
In many
organizations it is a practice that the organizations get this agreement signed
with all the employees that work in it. The reason is that the employer doesn’t
want its confidential information to get into the wrong hands. Similarly some
organizations enter into confidentiality agreements with all the small vendors
that transact with them on routine bases. There is different nature of
businesses and similarly these agreements are signed accordingly.
Whenever a
confidentiality agreement is signed between parties then it can have provisions
to restrict all the parties as well as one single party. When an agreement
restricts both the parties from disclosing information then it is a mutual
confidentiality agreement. In such kind of agreement the information is usually
disclosed by all the parties and they enter into agreement so that they do not
cheat each other. Similarly the agreement can be a simple one imposing
restrictions on one party only and it is referred as a unilateral secrecy
agreement. In this kind of agreement the secret information is disclosed by one
party to the other and the other party is bound to keep it secret under the
provisions of the agreement.
An aspect
is that most of the confidentiality agreements are mutual in nature. That way
such agreements restrict both the parties to the agreement from disclosing any
kind of data or information to the third parties. Such kinds of agreements
appear fair from their very essence and they create rights and obligations on
both ends rather than putting only one party under the obligations.
