Skip to main content

Wireless Industry Sues San Francisco, Wants Radiation Levels Hidden

The wireless industry sued the city of San Francisco on Friday to stop a law that requires cell phone stores to post how much radio energy each model emits.

It’s the first law of that kind in the nation. The industry trade group known as CTIA — The Wireless Association said the law will mislead consumers into thinking that one phone might be safer than another on the basis of radiation measurements.

Recommended Videos

Studies have not conclusively found that cell phone radiation is a health risk. Research continues on brain tumors.

In its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the industry group said the city is usurping the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, which sets limits for phone radiation.

The city attorney’s office said it had not seen the lawsuit and was unable to comment.

Previously, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office has said that the ordinance is “a quite modest measure that will provide greater transparency and information to consumers for whom this is an area of interest or concern.”

The local ordinance requires cell phone retailers to disclose a measure of much energy will theoretically be absorbed by a user’s head. FCC limits this specific absorption rate, or SAR, to an average of 1.6 watts per kilogram. Measurements for phones sold in the U.S. are available on the agency’s site, but not usually in stores.

“Nobody should be suggesting to consumers that they ought to be shopping for phones based on a difference in SAR values,” said John Walls, vice president for public affairs at CTIA. “There’s no scientific basis to suggest, as the ordinance does, that two phones with different values have a safety distinction between them,” as long as they’re below the FCC’s limit.

Under the law, larger chains will have to place SAR notices starting in February, while other stores will have until 2012.

The lawsuit is not the first response from CTIA. The association, which represents all major wireless carriers, usually holds a trade show in San Francisco in the fall. After the law was passed, CTIA announced that it would hold the show as planned this year, then look for another host city.

“We thought it was a clear message from the mayor that we weren’t wanted there,” Walls said.

San Francisco is known for novel legislation. It has banned plastic grocery bags, ended municipal use of bottled water, made composting mandatory and required the posting of nutrition information in restaurants.

Topics
Ian Bell
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
The Lenovo Legion gaming tablet was just released. Here’s why it is already on sale
The Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 sitting on a table.

Lenovo seems to be really trying hard to make a grand slam in the world of gaming tablets — making them a household name instead of something that you only hear about if you're in the know. As a result, they're iterating fast, and there seems to be some sort of effort to empty out stock quickly, even on newer products.

To put it all more concretely, we just talked about the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 this January, when CES stuff was going on. Now, there are rumors of an upcoming Lenovo gaming tablet already circulating. It was enough to make me double, even triple check what I was reading.

Read more
Watch the YouTube video that launched the site exactly 20 years ago
Jawed Karim in YouTube's first video in 2005.

It lacks the high production values present in so many of today’s YouTube videos, but then Jawed Karim wasn’t aiming for anything slick. It was merely a little something to launch his new video streaming site.

Filmed at San Diego Zoo by a friend and posted on April 23, 2005, Karim says straight to camera: “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to say.”

Read more
How is your phone camera tested? I flew to China to find out
oppo find x8 ultra review 2

For almost a decade, we’ve lived in an incredible era of smartphones. Phones do considerably more than they did eight years ago when the original iPhone launched, and nowhere is this more apparent than in smartphone cameras.

From single cameras — and occasionally double — in the pre-smartphone era, we’ve now descended into an era where three and four cameras are commonplace on smartphones. Instead of being focused on a subject immediately in front of you, the best smartphone cameras now allow you to zoom in or out, take incredible portrait photos, and record high-quality professional video.

Read more