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Europe Bans X-Ray Full-Body Scanners Over Health Concerns

November 16, 2011 at 2:47 PM | by | Comments (0)

The way that the European Union does airline security has, over the last few years, fallen somewhere short of reassuring. Despite last year's Christmas Day terrorist flight taking off from Amsterdam, and despite the terrorist managing to hide explosives in his underwear, the EU until this week had not had any binding operational standards on what airports could and couldn't do with scanners.

Now those rules have been published and they basically mirror TSA standards...with one glaring exception.

The Europeans, for whom data privacy is kind of a capital-T thing and has been for a very long time, had been slow to deploy full-body scanners across the continent in part exactly because of privacy concerns. The new policy introduces a number of safeguards that will be very familiar to US travelers: no storing of the images, no looking at the images except from a different room, and no forcing passengers to walk through the machines without offering an opt-out.

And then there's the part that's glaringly different from the US. Airports that use full-body scanners will not be allowed to use x-ray devices, only millimeter-wave devices (you can use our handy guide from last year to catch up on the differences).

Europe has decided that the health effects of x-ray scanners haven't been studied enough, and that they could pose "health and safety" risks to passengers.

You'll notice that the EU's take on full-body scanner safety is exactly the opposite of what TSA says. According to the TSA, x-ray machines are perfectly safe because they've asked Science and Science says so! The Europeans looked at studies too, though, and came to the opposite conclusion.

Now it's true that the Europeans are notoriously too careful when it comes to airline safety, but given the recent exposés about TSA's healthy studies—that they were fundamentally flawed and dishonestly characterized—US flyers should be asking TSA for even more explanations. An entire continent just decided that x-ray scanners can't be verified as safe, while TSA assures everyone that of course they're safe. Maybe the Europeans just didn't look at the studies long enough!

[Photo: cdedbdme / Flickr]

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