alt Hacker NewsKohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera
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Sounds like the crappiest data source for AI training yet.
But in all seriousness, of course they can access the data. Otherwise who else would process it to give any health results back? I don't think encryption in transit is relevant to privacy concerns because the concerns are about such data being tied to you at all, in any way. At the same time, yes, this could product valuable health information.
Their better bet would be to allow full anonymity, so even if there is a leak (yeah, the puns write themselves), there is never a connection between this data and your person.
We're past The Onion clips coming true, now it's Adult Swim:
Imagine the collective brainpower that could be used to help solve the world's ills, and instead decided, no, what we need is a camera pointed at your asshole which we feed into an AI-powered SaaS we can then sell to you for a subscription. This industry is finished.
They can encrypt data coming out of both ends?!
This obsession with personal health data collection is in its self counter productive to health outcomes and insane behavior.
> Kohler Health’s homepage, the page for the Kohler Health App, and a support page all use the term “end-to-end encryption” to describe the protection the app provides for data. Many media outlets included the claim in their articles covering the launch of the product.
When companies first wanted to sell things over the Web, a concern I heard a lot was that consumers would be afraid of getting ripped off somehow. So companies started emphasizing prominently how the customer was protected with n bits of encryption. As if this solved the problem. It did not, but people were confused by confident buzzwords.
(I was reminded of this, because I actually saw a modern Web site touting that prominently just last week, like maybe they were working from a 30 year-old Dotcom Marketing for Dummies book, and it was still not very applicable to the concern.)
Some marketers lie, or don't care what the truth is. They want success, and bonuses, and promotions. And, really, a toilet company possibly getting class-action sued for a feces camera that behaves in an unexpected way, that attorneys would have to convince a judge was misrepresented, and then quantify the unclear harm, and finally settle, several years later, for lawyers' fees and a $10 off coupon for the latest model Voyeur Toilet 3000... isn't on the radar of the marketers.
congratulations, you have lived to see man made horrors beyond your comprehension
Kohler can "de-identify [the user’s] data for lawful purposes." I mean exactly how would that ever be justified? "Hey, we see a man-sized log in the bowl. There's only supposed to be women there. The perp must be in that house!!!"
Even (especially?) for its stated purpose, this is cursed technology.
How does one "train" an AI with a flood of random toilet pictures and no corresponding medical data to match it with?
?? I got very confused from the start of this article because it is clear that Kohler is one end of the communication from how the product is described and marketed. They’re just stating the data is encrypted between the device and them.
I'm so sorry for the people who work on this and have to look at the data.
Kohler is a registered sex offender.
What. Who is buying a $600 camera to take pictures of your stool?
It would be naive to assume they couldn't access the data from a technical perspective. I think anyone in here would think so. The problem is regular customers who aren't technical and don't have much choice but to trust claims by the seller - these are the real victims here.
I feel End-to-end is over marketed. Yes it protects your data from transmission pipes, but data on both your "ends" can be easily controlled and duplicated. Your picture on your device can be accessed by 3rd party, so does your data on the server.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
Smart Pipe | Infomercials | Adult Swim
Everything in our lives is connected to the internet, so why not our toilets? Take a tour of Smart Pipe, the hot new tech startup that turns your waste into valuable information and fun social connectivity.
[Smart Pipe Inc. is a registered sex offender.]
Huh what could possibly go wrong here?
>https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/world/asia/south-korea-ca...
Oh...
Holy crap.
I remember a sign in our dorm bathroom that read, “toilet cam is for research purposes only”. It was a joke, but always got a nice reaction from new people in the building.
But they actually sell this?! And want to charge me for it!?
Holy crap!
The theranos of toilets
Did they say which ends they meant?
It was only a decade or so ago that "End-To-End Encryption" began to mean something other than "encrypted in transit".
E2EE now means something wildly different in the context of messaging applications and the like (since like 2014) so this is more of an outdated way of saying "no one is getting your poop pictures between your toilet and us".
It also feels like it would never make sense for this to be "E2EE encrypted" in the modern sense of the term as the "end user recipient" of the message is the service provider (Kohler) itself. "Encrypted in Transit" and "Encrypted at Rest" is about as good as you're going to get here IMO as the service provider is going to have to have access to the keys, so E2EE in a product like this is kind of impossible if you're not doing the processing on the device.
I wonder if they encrypt it and then send it over TLS or if they're just relying on TLS as the client->server encryption. Restated, I wonder how deep in their stack the encrypted blob goes before it's decrypted.
Features fully secure e2mitm2ee.
"end to end" I see what you did there.
What exactly is the toilet camera for? Are they taking pictures of your daily bowel movements?
I honestly cannot believe this device exists. I'm living in the absolute weirdest timeline that I could have never imagined. Imagine being an engineer working on this particular ring of the torment nexus.
No pictures were shown on the website.
So, end-to-end-encraption?
Oh wait, maybe this is what Cory Doctorow is referring to as enshittified?
I mean, these jokes make themselves, including whoever buys the hardware, AND buys the marketing pitch.
Enshittification has gone too far.
I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
Hi, who just joined?
Years ago, a friend and I were kicking around startup ideas. We weren't coming up with anything good, so we flipped it and decided to come up with the worst/dumbest idea possible. We landed on a social media site dedicated to poop (this was back when social media sites were all the rage). People could upload pictures of their poop, discuss poop, share "best poop" stories, and so on. We never actually built anything, realizing it was just a joke, a total waste of time. ... Fast forward to 2025: For $600-plus-monthly-subscription, we'll take pictures of your poop!
BTW, someone please tell me that there is/was a social media site dedicated to poop, and the founder got rich from it. I need that today.
Apotheosis of enshitification.
> collects images and data from inside, promising to track and provide insights on gut health, hydration, and more
cough bullshit.
Enshittification.
What I want to know is who is taking pictures of their poop like this? There has to be a better way.
AI enshitification. Literally.
So basically their marketing-department is abusing a security term in order to sound good, as opposed to a software flaw.
They're claiming "end to end" encryption, which usually implies the service is unable to spy on individual users that are communicating to one-another over an individualized channel.
However in this case there are no other users, and their server is one of the "ends" doing the communicating, which is... perhaps not a literal contradiction in terms, but certainly breaking the spirit of the phrase.