People can’t believe just how much airport security used to be able to see.
A viral post on X (formerly known as Twitter) has reignited a years-old sense of shock about just how invasive the big X-ray machines at airports really can be.
You know the drill – you’re on your way through airport security, quite possibly rushing because you’ve left it all a little late to make your flight.
After putting your bags onto the belt to get scanned, along with any jewelry, your phone and quite likely your shoes, you pad in a queue to go through a booth where you have to stand in the right position to be scanned.
Even years into the experience, it can still feel a little dystopian as the machine whirrs around you, but you’ll probably feel even queasier about it when you realize just what it could be capturing.
Most of us would probably assume that anything metallic or non-biological would be the thing that lights up on the scanner, and that our actual body would be a vague blur behind it.
Well, a post from X user @greendaylover44 suggests that some of these machines can in fact capture a lot more than that.
Back in 2020, they shared an image that purportedly shows snaps from an X-ray machine used by the TSA, which features high-detail images of a completely nude body, suggesting that these machines see it all every time we’re scanned.
It triggered a wave of unsurprising discontent as people realized that their privacy might have been a lot thinner than they thought whenever they traveled.
X / @greendaylover44
Of course, these security measures always come in for a reason, triggered by foiled or successful attempts to get around existing security options – but that doesn’t mean we have to feel thrilled by them.
Here comes the good news, though – it turns out these images are from an old generation of machine made by Rapiscan and used for a period of years by the TSA and the UK, too.
However, backlash at the time (in the early 2010s) was so severe as people made the same discoveries about their lack of privacy in the scanners that action has already been taken.
The TSA ended its contract with Rapiscan back in 2013 and has been using other scanners since then, which give a more generic and less detailed bodily scans.
So while the interest in these scanners is still completely valid, you can at least rest easy knowing your next trip won’t involve baring it all to some random airport worker.