'We don’t have any privacy any more': Father of cellphone sees dark side of smartphones, but also hope in new tech

Holding the bulky brick cellphone he’s credited with inventing 50 years ago, Martin Cooper thinks about the future.

Little did he know when he made the first call on a New York City street from a thick gray prototype that our world — and our information — would come to be encapsulated on a sleek glass sheath where we search, connect, like and buy.

He's optimistic that future advances in mobile technology can transform human lives but is also worried about risks smartphones pose to privacy and young people.

“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy any more because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” the 94-year-old told The Associated Press at MWC, or Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest wireless trade show where he was getting a lifetime award this week in Barcelona.

Besides worrying about the erosion of privacy, Cooper also acknowledged the negative side effects that come with smartphones and social media, such as internet addiction and making it easy for children to access harmful content.

But Cooper, describing himself as a dreamer and an optimist, said he's hopeful that advances in cellphone technology have the potential to revolutionise areas like education and health care.

“Between the cellphone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said.

A long way from where he started

Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a Manhattan street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype device that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier.

Cooper used the Dyna-TAC phone to famously call his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T. It was, literally, the world's first brick phone, weighing 2.5 pounds (1.14kg) and measuring 11 inches. Cooper spent the best part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market.

The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution, but looking back on that moment 50 years later, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment”, Cooper said.

“The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?' And it did," he said on Monday.

While blazing a trial for the wireless communications industry, he hoped that cellphone technology was just getting started. Cooper said he's “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they will be “distributed on your body," perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times”. Batteries could even be replaced by human energy.

"The human body is the charging station, right? You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?" he imagined.

Dark side to advances

Cooper also acknowledged there's a dark side to advances — the risk to privacy and to children.