Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For example, on the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage.
I'm not aware of any actual risks in the US, but then again I'm not in the US. For me this seems a minor point, and I actually enjoy separating my public persona from the company for which I work, being it Google or a small startup.
To be fair, I think the media would have done that even with a "speaking only for myself" disclaimer.
Dont name your company if you intend to speak for yourself.
Though I almost got to be the official spokesperson for British Telecom responding on the alt.2600 news group about the the Met police VMB hack - press office was cool but the internal security was not.
If no, why are you doing this for the company you're trading skills and time against money?
I didn't want to emphasize on that on the first comment yet to be honest, I find it pedantic because it's pointless, legally speaking.
This isn’t just ‘big tech’ - I work at a relatively small tech company, but I’d never want anything I say about the company to be mistaken as some sort of ‘official statement’ especially if it related to an incident that possibly had a financial impact on external parties, and could conceivably be misused in that context in the future.
I go as far as never writing private emails from my work mail for the same sort of reasons - although that is from a possibly over-abundance of caution.
Rumor mill journalists will mine social media and forum comments and write entire articles about "so and so FAANG employee gives hint at future merger" when some dev comments how much they've enjoyed using some library recently.
That's why we constantly get "it's just my opinion" used in reference to type-ii opinions (personal understanding of descriptive fact), when it's only really appropriate to type-i opinions (normative value).
Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF.
Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance.
It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything with regards to the company's PR?
Is there an actual risk in the US? Have there been trials or anything that push people to add such statements?