NDA-signers reveal the secrets they have been forced to keep for years: 'They utterly destroyed a brilliant product'

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JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor
Oct 25, 2025 10:00 AM EDT

Have you ever been forced to keep a secret that you desperately wanted to share? It can eat away at you. You would give anything to be able to tell someone your secret. Maybe it's a really good piece of juicy gossip. Maybe it's something that happened at work that you're not allowed to talk about. Maybe you even signed paperwork about it. 

Non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, are a pretty common tool to help keep secrets. Maybe your job requires one if you're dealing with something confidential. Maybe you had an interaction with a celebrity and they gave you one to keep you from blabbing to the press. Maybe you were part of production on a television show, and they want to keep any spoilers from getting out. Either way, you signed away your ability to spill. At least for some amount of time. But one day, that paperwork will lapse, and the world will get to know your secret. And you know what they say, "secrets secrets are no fun, unless you share with everyone." Well, they're going to be shared with everyone today. 

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  • A woman in greyscale holds a finger to her lips.
    via Kristina Flour

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • These internet commenters all signed NDAs, and either they were no longer in effect, or they just stopped caring, so they finally spilled their secrets to the world. And now we get to enjoy them. So scroll on for some formerly-confidential information. You just might find something interesting. 

  • What's something you were once forbidden to talk about because of an NDA, but can finally share now that it's expired or no longer valid?
    via u/newgen-toy
  • sfbiker999 · 11h ago The "Sophisticated financial analysis software written by our own software development team" that a former employer advertised to customers was really just a spreadsheet with a custom formula he wrote using Excel's native financial functions. He wouldn't show me the spreadsheet until I signed the NDA.
    via u/sfbiker999
  • boredwithennui · 5h ago I made the soil sampling Drill bit that's on the curiosity Rover that's on Mars. And couldn't tell a soul. It was maddening.
    via u/boredwithennui
  • instant_ramen_chef 11h ago The secret ingredient in the crab cakes is wine soaked mustard seeds.
    via u/instant_ramen_chef
  • notwhoyouthinkma... • 5h ago Lol as part of severance nda | agreed to not declare what is in it, which was 2 weeks pay. I couldn't believe that was all they put in there. I even asked a friend that's a lawyer that directly works in employment contracts read it and said, "just don't tell anyone you got the standard low ball severance."
    via u/notwhoyouthinkmaybe
  • Furio... 9h ago Edited 7h ago . long time ago I was hired into a lawfirm. Very shortly after onboarding, I was called into the partners office and told they had to let me go. I sort of laughed and said what for, I haven't done anything yet.
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • Well a few years prior, I had quit from a particularly crappy job. 2 years after quitting, I was subpoenaed to testify in someone elses suit against this crappy employer. With almost no idea it was going to go this way... I ended up as a primary witness and testified for over 3 hours. I found out later they were hit with a judgment of about $10 million, which I was
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • apparently pretty instrumental in supposedly. Well wouldn't you know it, this employer was a client of the lawfirm. Years after I quit, and years after being pulled into someone elses lawsuit, some enterprising compliance attorney called up this client of theirs and mentioned "oh by the way, we hired this person who used to work for you, in a completely different department from what you
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • use us for, so you'll never see them, but thought we should mention it..." The version of the conversation I was told was this compliance attorney was told something to the effect of "oh, thats nice. If you keep them, we will find a different firm to represent us and our roughly million dollars in billables we send you every year."
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • I was handed a pretty sizable check and told "you never worked here" and overnight all mention of me was scrubbed from the firm. There was an NDA which amounted to "please don't talk about this for awhile". Which I even had a whole conversation with them about how exactly I was going to explain in my now imminent job hunt leaving my previous senior position to go 'nowhere' for 'no reason'.
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • Very shitty thing to have happen, but at the same time, legitimately from a business perspective, I'm not worth losing a million a year over; so I sorta understood even if it really fucked up my life for a little bit.
    via u/Furiously-Listening
  • MidnightBluesAtNoon • 6h ago . Dunkin Donuts aren't made in house, and they have sucked universally ever since. Donuts are kind of preposterously perishable. They're perfectly safe to eat for days, but there's this very fragile way the grease is integrated into the dough that breaks down within about 12 hours of cooking that renders them
    via u/MidnightBluesAtNoon
  • stale and gives you that "waxy" feel in your mouth if you eat them. Likewise, the frosting tends to release water quickly too. But anyway, the point is, back in the day if you came into the store, you WERE going to get a fresh product as we cooked night and day. Now, the central distribution model almost guarantees you're
    via u/MidnightBluesAtNoon
  • getting a stale or near stale donut even first thing in the morning. No truck moves as fast as an in house baker. And it's such a goddamn shame. Shy of using egg protein powder instead of raw eggs for the sake of limiting cross contamination, they were at one time a completely legit bakery. They weren't doing anything or using anything you wouldn't at home. It was all just bigger, but even the mixer looked like a kitchen aid, just scaled up.
    via u/MidnightBluesAtNoon
  • They utterly destroyed a brilliant product and now just serve that horrid burnt coffee they've always had as though it were something to be proud of.
    via u/MidnightBluesAtNoon
  • sudomatrix • 11h ago The large multinational electronics company I worked for would run database reports on who was ABOUT to vest their stocks and fire them before they vested. I'm still afraid to say who it was because they'd probably sue me.
    via u/sudomatrix
  • Polyamommy 11h ago I once went on an audition, for what I thought was the gameshow Who Wants to be a Millionaire. When I got there, I was looking around the waiting room, and I thought it was peculiar that all of the contestant hopefuls looked very attractive.
    via u/newgen-toy
  • It got even weirder when we had to fill out an entire booklet about our lives, including neighbors, friends, and family information (as well as an NDA, that we couldn't discuss the audition).
    via u/sudomatrix
  • The screen test was unsettling, and they were asking REALLY personal questions. I explained I was religious (at the time), so I didn't have anything salacious to expose. They kept trying to direct me to take on some sort of "bad girl" persona, and it all felt very disorienting. I didn't comply.
    via u/sudomatrix
  • They later admitted it was really an audition for the first season of a new show called Big Brother.
    via u/sudomatrix
  • Neanderthal · 4h ago Worked as a knight at Medieval Times for several years. There were a couple times reality shows came in to do a Medieval themed episode and we would be extras for the day. I had to sign an NDA each time saying I wouldn't talk about the shoot. Now that they are expired I can tell you that Project Runway, Cake Boss, and Guy Fieri and Rachel Ray's Celebrity Cookoff have filmed at Medieval Times.
    via u/Neanderthal
  • DocBEsq 8h ago . In the early 2010s, my job was writing about tv shows for an entertainment website. A lot of the time, I would visit a set and interview people and whatnot. On the day that's relevant here, I was on set for the MTV show, Teen Wolf. In addition
    via u/DocBEsq
  • to interviewing some of the actors, they had me and another writer watch the "after show" they were making, where the actors. discussed the big plot twists. That was how I heard - a couple months before it was public that they were killing - off the female lead. Right afterwards, a publicist came by with NDAs. Had I leaked the spoiler, MTV could have sued me for $1 million.
    via u/DocBEsq
  • • zerbey 2h ago For a few years in the late 1990s you could have taken down a substantial part of the UK's Internet by shutting down a single router. It was on a public network, with telnet open, and the password was the name of a fruit.
    via u/zerbey
  • Accurate-Ad-7944 2h ago i was a test audience member for the movie Cats. the NDA we signed wasn't to prevent spoilers. it was to prevent us from warning the general public.
    via u/Accurate-Ad-7944
  • molten_dragon • 2h ago Apple was developing an electric car in the mid 2010s. I work for a Tier 1 auto supplier and sign quite a few NDAs as part of my job. Most of them are pretty standard stuff. Company A and Company B agree to share confidential info regarding products X, Y, and Z and will not share any of the info with outside parties. Blah, blah, blah.
    via u/molten_dragon
  • The only one that really stood out was the Apple one. They were looking to source radar and ultrasonic sensors for their autonomy features and I was involved in the acquisition on my side. I wasn't allowed to know anything about the project without signing the NDA, and once I signed it I wasn't
    via u/molten_dragon
  • allowed to say literally anything about the project or the customer to anyone who hadn't also signed the NDA. I wasn't allowed to tell my boss who the customer I was spending most of my time working with was. It was a crazy level of secrecy.
    via u/molten_dragon
  • darkphoenix9137 • 10h ago Space lasers really are a thing, but as far as I know they haven't been weaponized yet.
    via u/darkphoenix9137

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