The FCC’s radiation standards for your smartphone date back to the 1990s. But that’s OK. You use a belt clip, don’t you?

That hallmark of turn-of-the-century tech fashion is largely forgotten these days. That is, until you look at product manuals for some of the newest smartphones on the market. In the fine print about safety, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and LG all talk about accessories that keep a handset at least 1 centimeter away from your body, as if malls were still full of kiosks selling these things to Abercrombie-clad teens.

That fine print became an issue earlier this year in Berkeley, California, when the city government passed a law that would require stores to direct their customers’ attention to the radiation-risk language in cellphone user manuals. Like other proposed laws about phone radiation, it’s come under legal fire from the mobile industry.

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