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Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why it took them 3 years to find out, I thought these radiation tests are pretty basic these days due to cancer scares some decade and half (?) ago. I think gsmarena publishes similar values in their summary pages, but maybe its just copy paste from release material.

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I guess this is because the agency is underfunded. Their missions are not only to check the radiation on new phones but also to check all 2G/3G/4G/5G in France (about 200k) and investigated in case of radio-frequency problems.

> I wonder why it took them 3 years to find out

From the ANFR publication [1] «141 mobile phones, including Apple’s iPhone 12, have recently been tested to check compliance with limit SAR values».

I suspect they simply weren't tested before. sigh.

[1] https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/temporary-wit...

Most EU regulations let manufacturers self certify they are observing them. This should come with heavy testing but sadly this is so irregular you can get away with a lot.

A few years ago a French tech journal caught several huge chinese PSU maker who claimed they had all certification but during actual testing they would catch fire or short under 50% of rated load.

This was explained on French news: those radiation levels can vary with a software update. It's likely they were compliant before and a software update changed that.

Which also means the fix can be a software update. That was (according to the news) the likely way this would be resolved.

Yea this should have been acted on faster. I wish we had more of this data easily available for everything. Ear buds are directly next to our heads.

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