In the spirit of the Halloween season, IEEE Spectrum presents a pair of stories that—although grounded in scientific truth rather than the macabre—are no less harrowing. In today’s installment, Pete Warden shares two tales of last-minute deadlines and security concerns.
In 1998, Pete Warden was working long hours as a graphics engineer at Visual Sciences, a small U.K.-based studio leading the latest Formula One installment for PlayStation. The stakes were high for Formula 1 98: Publisher Psygnosis had previously collaborated with Bizarre Creations on two successful F1 titles. But this time, Bizarre turned down the project, leaving Visual Sciences’ 10-person team scrambling to build the game from scratch in nine months.
Two weeks before launch, a new crisis arose after Warden and his colleagues learned that the marketing team had promised players a live animated pit crew on the back of the box. With the packaging already printed, Psygnosis needed them to invent the nonexistent feature.
The back of the “F1 98” game’s box promised players an animated pit crew.Psygnosis
As a last-minute solution, they designed mini crew members made of triangles, who would pick up square tires and awkwardly attach them to the player’s car. They worked right up to the deadline, fully aware that the result wasn’t their best work. “As an engineer, knowing you’re doing a bad job is the ultimate terror,” Warden recalls.
The game arrived on shelves just before the final race of the 1998 Formula One season. Although F1 98 initially received lukewarm reviews, it became notorious online as one of the worst racing games ever made. A quick Google search turns up various YouTube videos and analyses highlighting its graphical-output limitations, understeering, and subpar immersion, among other flaws.
Pete Warden’s Apple badge.Pete Warden
By the early 2000s, Warden had shaken off the F1 98 nightmare and pivoted away from game development. His work on image-processing technology caught the attention of Apple, which hired him to integrate video detection functions into its products. After five years at the tech giant, Warden left in 2008 to pursue independent projects.
Three years later, Warden uncovered a serious privacy flaw that would implicate his former employer. He and security researcher Alasdair Allan discovered that iOS 4 was storing iPhone users’ latitude-longitude coordinates and time stamps in unencrypted files. Anyone who gained access to an iPhone—or a computer synced with one—could retrieve months of location history.
Warden was initially excited about unlocking the ability to trace his travels over the past year, but the creepiness set in once he recognized it as a serious privacy violation. He reported the issue to Apple via email but received no response.
Warden and Alasdair Allan released iPhone Tracker, an open-source app that allowed iPhone users to map their location data over time.Pete Warden
After double-checking their work, Allan and Warden decided to post the findings publicly on O’Reilly Radar. The pair also created an open-source application allowing iPhone users to visualize their location data on a map. The free app attracted over 4 million downloads in just a week, enabling other researchers to quickly reproduce the findings, while everyday iPhone users confirmed that their travels and time stamps were, in fact, being recorded. This crowdsourced confirmation gave Warden and Allan the confidence to stand by their findings.
The response was explosive. Major news outlets like The Guardian, Bloomberg, and The New York Times picked up the story, and Warden and Allan were inundated with interview requests from TV networks. Exposing one of the biggest companies in the world came with its own terrors. Warden feared any mistake could result in a lawsuit. That never happened, but Apple’s most loyal fans were outraged. Some claimed they would get Warden fired (even though he was self-employed then), while others threatened to find his home address.
Within a week, the media buzz prompted a statement from Apple. The company acknowledged the issue as a bug related to a crowdsourced database of local Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers, and it planned to release an iOS update addressing users’ privacy concerns.
Warden’s career has been relatively calm since then, albeit still eventful. In 2011, he cofounded Jetpac, an image-processing app that generated city guides from publicly available Instagram photos. Jetpac was later acquired by Google, where Warden worked on the TensorFlow Lite machine learning library. He left the company in 2022 to start Useful Sensors, a startup focused on combining machine learning with hardware tools. His latest project is a privacy-centric language translation device that operates offline. “That, so far, has not been a horror story,” he says.
