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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I think part of the problem is that prior to WhatsApp's E2EE implementation in like 2014, TLS was very often called "End to End Encryption" as the ends were Client and Server/Service Provider. It got redefined and now the new usage is way more popular than the old one.
I can't blame most people for calling TLS "E2EE", even some folks in industry, but it's not great for a company to advertise that you offer X if the meaning of X has shifted so drastically in the last decade.
I’m pushing back on that one. I’ve been running websites since the ‘90s, and I’ve never heard E2EE used that way until very recently by vendors who, bluntly, want to lie about it.
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.
> 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 that 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.
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.
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.
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!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I have never seen "e2ee" abused this way personally.
“In transit encryption”
Creating a new term for the less secure definition doesn't work, as they'll just continue to call it E2EE encrypted.
I think part of the problem is that prior to WhatsApp's E2EE implementation in like 2014, TLS was very often called "End to End Encryption" as the ends were Client and Server/Service Provider. It got redefined and now the new usage is way more popular than the old one.
I can't blame most people for calling TLS "E2EE", even some folks in industry, but it's not great for a company to advertise that you offer X if the meaning of X has shifted so drastically in the last decade.
I’m pushing back on that one. I’ve been running websites since the ‘90s, and I’ve never heard E2EE used that way until very recently by vendors who, bluntly, want to lie about it.
I despise how often that’s used. “Do you have end to end encryption?” “Sure! We use TLS for everything, and KMS for at-rest.” “So… no?”
While they’re taking one “end” much less literally than usual, they are taking the other “end” much more literally…
This obsession with personal health data collection is in its self counter productive to health outcomes and insane behavior.
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.
You could have a classifier running on-device that sends summary data (rather than raw images) back to Kohler.
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
Well, this waste analyzing piece of e-waste costs $600, so you could probably cram a lot of inference horsepower in there if you wanted to.
> 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 that 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.
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.
They can encrypt data coming out of both ends?!
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?
"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.
They probably do clinical trials (or at least something like that) where they get baseline data from participants through other means.
I'm talking about sold units in the field.
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.
Huh what could possibly go wrong here?
>https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/world/asia/south-korea-ca...
Oh...
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.
Apotheosis of enshitification.
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!
They want to charge you $600 for it, plus a $7/mo subscription.
So they made Google TISP?
https://archive.google/tisp/index.html
To me it reminds me of Smart Pipe.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
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.]
Did they say which ends they meant?
I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
Enshittification has gone too far.
No pictures were shown on the website.
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.
Hi, who just joined?
Holy fuck they actually built Smart Pipe[1]
1: https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ?si=bSRE2lOqwwm1Q_D9
I'm convinced whatever Torment Nexus we can think of will get built.
Rule 34(B)?
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
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.
It would be end-to-end only if it was pee-to-pee.