That time I accidentally built a spying app

A personal story about creating new products and their unintended consequences

In the fall of 2007, my parents gave me an unforgettable gift for my sixteenth birthday: a first-generation iPhone.

I still clearly remember watching the keynote in which Steve Jobs announced the first Apple-branded phone a few months earlier. As a teenager attending high school in my hometown of Vicenza, Italy, I tuned into the livestream just before dinner, carefully listening to every word he said. That evening, Jobs started announcing a “widescreen iPod with touch controls”, a “revolutionary mobile phone” and a “breakthrough Internet communications device”–theatrically pausing before confessing that he was actually talking about one single device: the iPhone. Thousands of miles away from me, you could hear attendees exploding cheerfully through the live feed. Jobs went on demoing this amazing invention that, a decade later, would end up changing much more than the mobile phones market: it directly or indirectly impacted our society through mobile web, app stores, changing work-life balance, and social media.

October came, and so did the day I finally got my iPhone. I was really excited as I was the first one in my social circle with one. Every other teenager (and adult!) that saw my…