Smart toilets and data privacy

 Something to sit and think about:

Smart toilets could leak your medical data, warn security experts. by Matthew Sparkes New Scientist, Volume 259, Issue 3456, 2023, Page 14, ISSN 0262-4079, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(23)01720-7. 

"A range of start-ups and research projects have developed smart toilets to monitor everything from heart rate to the consistency of stools and the presence of certain proteins in urine that indicate disease. One device even features an “anus camera” that takes a photo from below for identification, something that has been described as the “polar opposite of facial recognition”.*

...

"One concern was the privacy of people other than the owner: are visitors consenting to have photographs or measurements taken? There were also worries about the risk of losing sensitive data to hackers, as well as the possibility of companies selling the data on. And if smart toilets were installed in public areas or workplaces, there would be questions about who has access to that data, it was argued.The group of experts concluded that smart toilets shouldn't be sold as consumer devices, but instead as medical devices that have to meet high regulatory standards for privacy and safety (arXiv, doi.org/ksx5).

"Chase Moyle at smart toilet start-up Coprata says he set out to build a consumer device because creating a medical device under US Food and Drug Administration regulations would raise the price by a factor of 10. It would also mean that, in the US, insurance companies would only offer it to people with diagnosed conditions.

...

"Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey, UK, says so-called internet of things (IoT) devices, such as heart rate monitors and CCTV cameras, have often been found to have security flaws, including a smart toilet with a computer-controlled bidet. He fears the same could be true for medical-focused smart toilets. “With a lot of IoT devices, security has never been uppermost in the mind and yet something like a smart toilet is collecting some very personal data,” he says. “They're making these weird devices because they can, but nobody's thought through ‘should we?’”

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See also (for the first instance of that quote I can find):

‘Smart toilet’ monitors for signs of disease. A disease-detecting “precision health” toilet can sense multiple signs of illness through automated urine and stool analysis, a new Stanford study reports.  April 6, 2020 - By Hanae Armitage, Stanford Medicine News

"One of the most important aspects of the smart toilet may well be one of the most surprising — and perhaps unnerving: It has a built-in identification system. “The whole point is to provide precise, individualized health feedback, so we needed to make sure the toilet could discern between users,” Gambhir said. “To do so, we made a flush lever that reads fingerprints.” The team realized, however, that fingerprints aren’t quite foolproof. What if one person uses the toilet, but someone else flushes it? Or what if the toilet is of the auto-flush variety?

"They added a small scanner that images a rather camera-shy part of the body. You might call it the polar opposite of facial recognition. In other words, to fully reap the benefits of the smart toilet, users must make their peace with a camera that scans their anus.

“We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique,” Gambhir said. The scans — both finger and nonfinger — are used purely as a recognition system to match users to their specific data. No one, not you or your doctor, will see the scans."

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Also, Meet the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes 

"Public Health Prize

Citation: "Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies—including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link—to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete."