The funny part, the whole reason I saved this link, is the description of a "poop-analyzing toilet" system as "end-to-end encrypted."
That's where my amusement stops.
A toilet camera that can analyze your poop isn’t as private as its marketing suggests.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say!
In October, Kohler Health announced the Dekoda, a $599 camera that hangs on the rim of your toilet and analyzes your stool and urine for potential health insights.
I am moved to wonder: is this article really a privacy warning or, given the repetition of the vendor, product name, and price tag, is it actually an ad?
However, Kohler designed the camera’s sensors to face downward and advertised the system as end-to-end encrypted, a term that often implies the provider can’t read the user’s data.
What's it matter where the camera is facing? Some asshole seeing my asshole is far less worrisome to me than someone being able to exploit the data. For instance, selling it to health insurers. "Oh, don't be paranoid; that won't happen." Maybe not, but the risk is too high. It's like those period-tracker apps, which women living in red states quickly found out were notifying the authorities whenever a pregnancy was possible, so they could be investigated for abortion if the period started up again too soon.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen. I know. At least I don't think it has, not yet. But it's not outside the realm of possibility. Government access to data normally considered private is absolutely possible, supposedly with a search warrant, but either way, "legal investigation" is one absolute exemption to privacy.
But a former technology advisor to the Federal Trade Commission took a closer look at the encryption claims, and found them to be bogus.
I'm not going to get into whether this one guy was correct or not. I don't much care because I'm not going to buy a poop anal-yzer either way.
I know a lot of people have given up on privacy. Those people are as annoying to me as I'm sure I am to those who haven't yet given up on the idea that we'll do anything about climate change.
End-to-end encryption is most often used when talking about messaging apps... The term means that only the sender and recipient’s devices can decrypt any data, preventing the service provider from reading the messages.
This is why WhatsApp and Signal can’t hand the contents of you messages over to law enforcement. The encryption keys are stored on the devices, not the company’s servers.
I vaguely remember reading recently that at least one of those apps isn't truly secure from that, either.
Kohler Health also confirmed that it can harness the collected data to train AI programs, a concern that Fondrie-Teitler flagged.
Great. Now the AI is literally up our asses.
In response to the privacy concerns, it noted: “Privacy and security are foundational to Kohler Health because we know health data is deeply personal. We welcome user feedback and want to ensure they understand that every element of the product is designed with privacy and security in mind.”
My own internal poop-analyzer is tuned only to that which emerges from the male bovine, and it just flashed red.
