Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera

https://varlogsimon.leaflet.pub/3m6zrw6k2bs2p?interactionDrawer=quotes

by TimDotC • 8 months ago

237 219 8 months ago

varlogsimon.leaflet.pub

codingdave• 8 months ago

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.

fastball2• 8 months ago

You could have a classifier running on-device that sends summary data (rather than raw images) back to Kohler.

karlgkk• 8 months ago

Yeah, it’s kinda like such a reasonable thing too

Doing on device compute is probably expensive and would prohibit such a product based on the economics but ITS A GENITAL CAM

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

But in all seriousness, of course they can access the data. Otherwise who else would process it to give any health results back?

It's "of course" for very knowledgeable people, normal people just assume that it means guaranteed privacy

duskdozer3• 8 months ago

Otherwise who else would process it to give any health results back?

Well it could be processed on-device.

tbrownaw2• 8 months ago

That would only work after they're done training the ai models.

comradesmith• 8 months ago

Holy fuck they actually built Smart Pipe[1]

1: https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ?si=bSRE2lOqwwm1Q_D9

jack1243star• 8 months ago

I'm convinced whatever Torment Nexus we can think of will get built.

ChrisMarshallNY• 8 months ago

Rule 34(B)?

anArbitraryOne• 8 months ago

Now's the time to get on board so that, when they launch the social network, you can be a top influencer just like Scout

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

#itsmyanus

Terr_• 8 months ago

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.

bmandale• 8 months ago

This is an incredibly common misuse of the term e2ee. I think at this point we need a new word because you have a coin flip's chance of actually getting what you think when a company describes their product this way.

tacitusarc• 8 months ago

“In transit encryption”

fastball2• 8 months ago

I have never seen "e2ee" abused this way personally.

WatchDog• 8 months ago

Any new term you come up with, will end up being misused by marketers.

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

It's not incredibly common, there's sure a lot of companies that try to misuse it, but the average person (even non technical) still interprets it in the correct way

addaon• 8 months ago

While they’re taking one “end” much less literally than usual, they are taking the other “end” much more literally…

koolba• 8 months ago

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.

Am I understanding correctly that the other end of this is a rear end?

hulitu2• 8 months ago

Every front end needs a rear end. So, yes.

geoduck14• 8 months ago

This is exactly what E2EE means. I used to work at a bank, and our data was E2EE, and we had to certify that it was E2EE - from the person paying, through the networks, through the DNS and Load balancers, until it got to the servers. Only at the servers could it be unencrypted and a (authoried) human could look at it.

Of course, only authorized users could see the data, but that was a different compliance line item.

kstrauser7• 8 months ago

Nah. You have no reasonable expectation that the bank itself can’t access your financial records. Anyone reading Kohler’s lies would have every expectation that the Internet of Poopcam screenshots are theirs and theirs alone.

hahn-kev• 8 months ago

Doesn't that just mean HTTPS then?

modeless4• 8 months ago

No, E2EE doesn't mean it's encrypted until the service provider decrypts it. E2EE means the service provider is unable to decrypt it. What you are describing is encryption in transit (and possibly at rest).

Bank data is never E2EE because the bank needs to see it. If banks call it E2EE they are misusing the term. E2EE for financial transactions would look like e.g. ZCash.

pyuser5833• 8 months ago

It sounds like one term is being used for two very different things.

lmm• 8 months ago

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.

It doesn't "imply", it outright states that. Their server isn't the end, it's the middle. They're not "breaking the spirit" or something, what they are doing is called lying.

d1sxeyes2• 8 months ago

What is the other “end”?

kstrauser7• 8 months ago

Did they say which ends they meant?

joezydeco2• 8 months ago

How does one "train" an AI with a flood of random toilet pictures and no corresponding medical data to match it with?

imglorp• 8 months ago

"potty training". Sorry.

Anyway a chemical or biological sensor in the bowl might be more useful.

Optical could be useful if it's doing spectrographic analysis: the color of poo and urine is sometimes informative.

hackernudes2• 8 months ago

They probably do clinical trials (or at least something like that) where they get baseline data from participants through other means.

joezydeco2• 8 months ago

I'm talking about sold units in the field.

captainkrtek• 8 months ago

I think the obvious things are:

- Deviation in consistency/texture/color/etc.

- Obvious signs related to the above (eg: diarrhea, dehydration, blood in stool).

Ultimately though, you can get the same results by just looking down yourself and being curious if things look off...

tldr: this feels like literal internet-of-shit IoT stuff.

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

They probably do match it, with data collected from other sources

venturecruelty7• 8 months ago

You pay someone in a developing nation $1.00 per day to look at thousands of photos of shit. Like, how do people think Facebook moderation and semantic labeling happen? Cheap labor in places with no labor laws. It was ever thus.

xp843• 8 months ago

Appropriate username.

And oh dear, that’s all too realistic. Imagine responding to the job posting and finding out these are the images you’ll be classifying.

lotrjohn• 8 months ago

They can encrypt data coming out of both ends?!

fransje26• 8 months ago

Sounds like something they pulled out of their ass..

Dilettante_2• 8 months ago

But their algorithms are number 1 on the market!

mystraline• 8 months ago

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.

bombcar• 8 months ago

It would be end-to-end only if it was pee-to-pee.

Duanemclemore• 8 months ago

So they made Google TISP?

https://archive.google/tisp/index.html

jchw• 8 months ago

To me it reminds me of Smart Pipe.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

crmd• 8 months ago

I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.

patjensen• 8 months ago

Hi, who just joined?

rglover• 8 months ago

Even (especially?) for its stated purpose, this is cursed technology.

m3kw9• 8 months ago

No pictures were shown on the website.

levocardia• 8 months ago

Huh what could possibly go wrong here?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/world/asia/south-korea-ca...

Oh...

gowld• 8 months ago

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.]

doctorzook• 8 months ago

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!

Sanzig2• 8 months ago

They want to charge you $600 for it, plus a $7/mo subscription.

smartbit• 8 months ago

The Dekoda should come with this sticker Aus hygienischen Gründen wird diese Toilette videoüberwacht

https://shop.digitalcourage.de/digitalcourage-und-ccc-aufkle...

neilv• 8 months ago

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.

calebio9• 8 months ago

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.

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

It was only a decade or so ago that "End-To-End Encryption" began to mean something other than "encrypted in transit".

No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol (and even there someone competent in cryptography would probably not have chosen that term)

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".

The outdated way was saying "Military-grade 128-bit encryption", no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning

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.

Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system

calebio9• 8 months ago

No, before that it was simply not a term, except in some obscure radio protocol
no one really used the E2EE term before it got the current meaning

It most certainly was a term and no it wasn't simply limited to "some obscure radio protocol".

1994: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/363791

1984: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/357401.357402

1978: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA059221.pdf

Some homemade encryption added on top of TLS is very unlikely to increase the security of the system

"Some homemade encryption" is not what I was suggesting at all. E.g. encrypted-at-the-source (client side) AWS files are still sent over TLS as an encrypted blob within an encrypted blob but remain encrypted past the TLS boundary.

SoftTalker• 8 months ago

Enshittification has gone too far.

Mistletoe• 8 months ago

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.

petterroea• 8 months ago

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.

geraldalewis• 8 months ago

Apotheosis of enshitification.

tracerbulletx• 8 months ago

This obsession with personal health data collection is in its self counter productive to health outcomes and insane behavior.

jamesgill• 8 months ago

Enshittification.

schmuckonwheels• 8 months ago

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.

EdwardDiego• 8 months ago

They claim it only points about your doings, but even then...

IAmBroom4• 8 months ago

Is there a spare 'i' in your post?

venturecruelty7• 8 months ago

This is downstream from the notion that companies need to have infinite growth forever. Of course, that's not possible, so this is the end stages of that: wealth trickles up while the, well... you can guess what's trickling down.

IAmBroom4• 8 months ago

Ironically, "Trickle-Down Economics" was phrased in a circa-1900 political cartoon as "The horse eats the grain, and then trickles it down to the sparrow on the barn floor." I'll let you picture the image.

Aeolun• 8 months ago

It’s pretty impressive that that juicero thing wasn’t the most bizarre thing they could come up with.

mzhaase• 8 months ago

I watched a teardown of it and the truly bizarre thing was that the build quality was actually amazing. Machined out of a huge block of aluminum, really big bearings, etc.

phoronixrly• 8 months ago

Who the hell buys this...

potato3732842• 8 months ago

It's pointed at the toilet bowl contents though it may catch some scrot in the edge of frame depending upon ambient temperatures.

https://images.ctfassets.net/veq5rt4lbvkn/2bpiwr3gYoRPnXqB8e...

stef252• 8 months ago

Can you send it in for servicing when the lens becomes obscured ?

IAmBroom4• 8 months ago

I just want to note: I upvoted you for the phrase "catch some scrot".

"[D]epending upon ambient tempertures and user age" is probably more accurate.

nh23423fefe• 8 months ago

its almost like there is no collective making the absurd decision you suppose is being made somewhere. no one is going to pay my rent for solving the worlds ills whatever that means.

handfuloflight• 8 months ago

I'm so sorry for the people who work on this and have to look at the data.

adamwong2462• 8 months ago

some poor soul has to do train this AI. Imagine your job is categorizing pictures of poop

tasty_freeze• 8 months ago

The old adage is "garbage in, garbage out". s/garbage/feces/g

This sounds like the marketing department came up with this "market opportunity" and then some poor team at Kohler was asked to make it real.

No doubt there is health data to be had in waste products (it was used extensively during covid to figure out community-wide infection rates) but that used physical samples that were then analyzed. Trying to figure out if someone has a UTI, or pathogenic poop from a webcam image ... it is hopeless.

woeirua• 8 months ago

What. Who is buying a $600 camera to take pictures of your stool?

defrost• 8 months ago

Not the people spending $12.1m on a gold toilet that's for sure.

You wouldn't want that cheap tat miring up the clean lines of your throne.

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd07dprln9o

mingus882• 8 months ago

People who have clinical gut issues need to track this kind of thing

And people who are being treated for gut issues can pay for their $600 medical toilet with HSA or insurance

Honestly, that this camera toilet exists is not a WTF for me. If my doctor needs to track changes to my stool, I certainly don’t want to have to hover over the bowl with my phone out. Please, just have the toilet take the picture.

kstrauser7• 8 months ago

You know, obvious humor potential aside, that’s a great point. Fewer people would laugh about a pee analyzer: “Oh, it can tell if you’re dehydrated, or in ketosis, or whatever? Makes sense!” I can imagine how this could gather similar types of information.

And yes, if my doctor wanted me to collect that info, I’d vastly rather buy a smart toilet and let it do the dirty work. That is, assuming it was actually secure.

dgrin91• 8 months ago

Don't forget the subscription fee

cowsandmilk• 8 months ago

?? 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.

amingilani• 8 months ago

it is clear that Kohler is one end of the communication

That’s not end-to-end encryption. By that logic HN, and any other website over HTTPS is E2E encrypted.

richbell• 8 months ago

That is what "end-to-end encryption" has come to mean in marketing. In the same way that every single product is "natural."

amelius3• 8 months ago

Is HTTPS really always E2EE?

I was under the impression that large companies use proxies so they can do deep packet inspection.

PS: you are right of course.

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

No, they're just trying to mislead their clients

est2• 8 months ago

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.

g-b-r15• 8 months ago

End-to-end encryption is not a term used for communication between clients and servers, although I saw several marketers trying to do it.

For normal people E2EE means privacy, and that's why some company tries to sneak the term in products where it makes no sense.

est2• 8 months ago

For normal people E2EE means privacy

It's misunderstood.

In the begining it's used to describe chat apps, your chat message are delivered in a secure way.

But later some marketers try to use it as a "transport channel" for client-server interactions.

recursivedoubts• 8 months ago

congratulations, you have lived to see man made horrors beyond your comprehension

RockRobotRock• 8 months ago

Kohler is a registered sex offender.

alexjplant• 8 months ago

Satire is dead. A toilet company killed it.

halapro• 8 months ago

Could easily have been an SNL sketch in 2010

avidiax• 8 months ago

Smart Pipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

jimt1234• 8 months ago

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.

lisbbb2• 8 months ago

I believe it is called "reddit"

venturecruelty7• 8 months ago

Look on the bright side: you can tell people you were simply ahead of your time!

beej71• 8 months ago

Features fully secure e2mitm2ee.

jmonty900• 8 months ago

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!!!"

duskdozer3• 8 months ago

IP address, device identifier, mother's maiden name, SSN, etc etc

venturecruelty7• 8 months ago

You mean the I-Pee address? Sorry, y'all, I gotta get it out in this thread, it's too easy.

tbrownaw2• 8 months ago

That is very strangely worded, to a degree they I wonder if maybe the wordsmithing was outsourced to either an ai or someone who didn't do English very well. Or if it's meant to be confusing.

But the linked privacy policy talks about making anonymous (aka de-identified) bulk data sets and using them for "lawful business purposes" (aka anything they want that's not illegal).

adamwong2462• 8 months ago

The theranos of toilets

iwontberude• 8 months ago

What I want to know is who is taking pictures of their poop like this? There has to be a better way.

boxerab• 8 months ago

"end to end" I see what you did there.

bvan• 8 months ago

AI enshitification. Literally.

nurettin• 8 months ago

collects images and data from inside, promising to track and provide insights on gut health, hydration, and more

cough bullshit.

lisbbb2• 8 months ago

What exactly is the toilet camera for? Are they taking pictures of your daily bowel movements?

andai• 8 months ago

We're past The Onion clips coming true, now it's Adult Swim:

https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ

Cyphase• 8 months ago

Our crypto cookies implement end-to-end encryption by creating a digest of the input morsels and securing their transit between the front end and the back end. Be warned, certain failure modes can result in over-encryption or return of partially-encrypted ciphertext to the sender.

internet_points• 8 months ago

The Norwegian term for e2ee is "ende-til-ende-kryptering".

And "ende" can also mean 'butt' https://naob.no/ordbok/ende_3#52867988

So I guess it makes some kind of sense.

xp843• 8 months ago

Rear-end-to-end encryption, if you will.

BrenBarn• 8 months ago

Let's think about why we're in a world where someone wants to sell you a camera to put in your toilet.

amelius3• 8 months ago

At least it is still optional. Imagine a world where cameras came preinstalled, and your toilet would phone home like your SmartTV and there was no way out of it.

stevenjgarner• 8 months ago

Here we are 35 years after the invention of the web browser, and now browser fingerprinting is an exact science. [1] I'm guessing 35 years from now toilet bowl fingerprinting will be an exact science. Claims of "de-identified and/or anonymized data" are reckless and naive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46016249

lambdaone• 8 months ago

This brings back memories of Adult Swim's "Smart Pipe" spoof infomercial.

fragmede• 8 months ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ for those who haven't seen it yet.

edit: also, what the hell, YouTube? they've got this new link shorter at https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ that they really want you to use, that forces you to use the browser to watch it instead of the app? so weird.

davedx• 8 months ago

Does this count as enshittification?

teekert• 8 months ago

"Hey man, we didn't specify where the ends are."

sriram_malhar• 8 months ago

This world is upside down. I wake up feeling like I am the man in the middle being attacked from all sides.

poisonborz• 8 months ago

The problem is genuinely the misleading nature of the phrase "end to end" and the lack of a better alternative. HTTPS is "end to end". There should be some new word for "decryptable only by the user".

amelius3• 8 months ago

We need more products to be vendor agnostic, really.

There are numerous benefits. For one, it will make people aware where their data goes when they set up the device.

butvacuum7• 8 months ago

It's in the name. TLS- Transport Layer Security.

lrvick• 8 months ago

So basically some idiot company connected toilets with cameras to the internet claiming the media collected of peoples "ends" was end to end encrypted. Except, it wasn't.

These compromised toilets could be easily used to exfiltrate compromising videos of exfiltrations.

The toilets leak pictures of people taking leaks.

The internet really is going to shit.

stef252• 8 months ago

Fingers crossed they'll pivot to a smart anal probe I can just leave in there

Artoooooor• 8 months ago

Words "toilet" and "camera" should never appear in one product's description

Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera

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