As an Indian American, I opt out of this photo scanning and the mm wave scanners (and get a pat down) every single time.
The system needs active backpressure.
The system needs active backpressure.
(I always ask to be opted into them because they seem to understand my cardiac device and give me a green light, whereas the metal detectors always trigger, followed by a yelling contest where they are yelling at me to take shit out of my pockets and I'm yelling that I don't have anything in my pockets and have a cardiac device)
0) For years and years and years, European prisons and airports refused to use them because they were deemed to be largely ineffective.
1) They're very, very, very expensive.
2) As mentioned above, they're ineffective. Explosives in a body cavity or a dense hairdo, or spread thinly across one's skin cannot be detected by these devices. Early on there were also demonstrations of fairly-reliable methods of storing weapons that would have been detected by a metal detector on one's person so that they could not be detected by the scanner.
3) When checkpoints get backed up and the lines get too long, TSA often bypass the scanners AND patdowns by running huge numbers of people only through metal detectors.
4) When they were first introduced in the US, they were obviously sufficiently-high resolution to get a clear nude picture of you.
5) No thought had been put into ensuring that these nude photos were not stored... and the only way this was discovered was by some researchers getting a hold of one and finding all of the nude photos of travellers on the thing's storage.
6) It was very, very obvious that TSA screeners were using the pornoscanners to perv on attractive travelers. I used to fly a fair bit and I often heard smoking-hot babes and dudes talk about having to go through the scanners multiple times because of a "glitch" or a "bad scan".
The claim is that points four through six were addressed by making the on-scanner screens show a paper doll with a "region of interest". I have zero faith that the scanners stopped storing full-resolution scans on the machine's local storage, and zero faith that checkpoint personnel are unable to access that storage. I also note that even years after the paper-doll update, checkpoints had a habit of refusing to run children under 13 through the scanner, and usually ran families with kids so young just through a metal detector. This absolutely is not evidence of data storage, but given how insane the US is about data handling regarding kids under 13, it sure is suggestive of it.
In the US they were enabled by a former TSA agent, gone contractor, and selling it back to the TSA