Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages.

Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees have left the company over the past month or so. 

White hat hacker Ben Caudill is halfway through his sandwich when he casually reaches over to his iPhone, swipes the screen a few times, then holds it up to me. “Is that you?” he asks.

It is, but nobody was supposed to know. He’s showing me one of my posts to Secret, the popular anonymous sharing app that lets you confess your darkest secrets to your friends without anyone knowing it’s you. A few minutes ago I gave Caudill my personal e-mail address, and that was all he needed to discover my secret in the middle of a Palo Alto diner, while eating a BLT. My secret is pretty lame, but Secret’s stream is slurry of flippant posts, Silicon Valley gossip, and genuinely personally confessions like.

A Brazilian judge has called for Apple and Google to remove the anonymous social network Secret from their app stores and wipe it from phones on which it has already been installed across the country.

The San Francisco startup has come under fire from those charging that Secret and other anonymous apps too easily become sanctuaries for cyberbullying. Last week, a San Diego man started a Change.org petition seeking to remove Secret from Apple and Android app stores, though the petition had little support. On Monday, an opinion piece in the New York Times argued that anonymous apps and Internet websites such as Secret often make women and minorities a target for attack.