Originally Posted by jayeff

It should be stating the obvious that without a confidentiality agreement, you should have expected this outcome. If you didn't at least have a verbal promise of confidentiality, I don't think there is even an ethical issue because surely it must have occurred to you that a traffic service would jump at a new opportunity to make money.

As to your premise as a general principle, I think you are totally wrong. It's a cute idea that we are all smart enough to have a flow of good ideas one after another, but it's arrogant and naive. There are always more ideas to be had, even if many are only sparks of ideas, working as part of a group of friends, co-workers, in professional associations or whatever, than sitting alone in splendid isolation. That doesn't mean giving away blueprints of your latest moneymaker on day one: but it's ludicrous how many people in this business jealously guard information which wasn't even useful when it was new and then spend a big part of their time solving basic problems other people found the answers to months or years earlier.