Kohler steps into privacy doo-doo with its poop-analyzing toilet cam

A privacy brouhaha has erupted over Kohler Health’s new toilet camera, the Dekota, which scans your feces for clues about your gut health.

Specifically, a security researcher disputes Kohler Health’s claims that data collected by Dekota, including scans of your feces, is end-to-end encrypted. Kohler Health, meanwhile, is doubling down, compensating for the fact that the connection East end-to-end encrypted.

In a blog post, researcher Simon Fondrie-Teitler (as reported by TechCrunch) defines end-to-end encryption as “a method of securing data that ensures that only the sender and their chosen recipient can view it. Properly implemented, it prevents other parties, including the application developer, from accessing the protected data.”

But as Fondrie-Teitler learned in her research, Kohler Health do get access to data collected by the Dakota, a $599 device that attaches to the side of your toilet and directs an optical sensor to the bottom of your toilet bowl, where it examines your stool and reports on its results in the Kohler Health app.

So, Fondrie-Teitler says, while the Dakota data tunnel may indeed be encrypted, it is not end-to-end.END encrypted, just like secure connections between two parties during a WhatsApp call or the “client-side” encryption used by Apple’s iCloud storage service, which prevents Apple itself from seeing a user’s data.

“What Kohler calls E2EE here is simply HTTPS encryption between the application and the server, a core security practice for two decades now, as well as encryption at rest,” Fondrie-Teitler concluded, while adding that Kohler Health’s privacy policy states that it can use Dekota data to train AI models.

As Fondrie-Teitler noted, many tech journalists (myself included) have picked up on Kohler Health’s end-to-end encryption claims regarding the Dekota toilet camera. So naturally I contacted the company for more details.

Here is the statement I received:

“The term end-to-end encryption is often used in the context of products that allow one user (sender) to communicate with another user (recipient), such as a messaging application. Kohler Health is not a messaging application. In this case, we used the term in relation to the encryption of data between our users (sender) and Kohler Health (recipient).

We encrypt data end-to-end in transit, as it travels between user devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide and improve our service. We also encrypt sensitive user data at rest, when stored on a user’s mobile phone, on the toilet, and on our systems.

If a user consents (which is optional), Kohler Health may anonymize data and use the anonymized data to train the AI ​​that drives our product. This consent checkbox is displayed in the Kohler Health app, is optional, and is not pre-checked.

Privacy and security are fundamental to Kohler Health because we know that health data is deeply personal. We value user feedback and want to make sure they understand that every element of the product is designed with privacy and security in mind.

So, by Kohler’s logic, Kohler Health is considered a trusted party at the other end of its encrypted toilet camera tunnel, because Kohler Health is not an email service and therefore counts as end-to-end encryption.

But there’s also an argument to be made that even though Kohler Health isn’t an email service, it’s still a company acting as a gatekeeper to our private data, and the term “end-to-end encryption” implies that Kohler will treat that data the same way Apple does with iCloud, meaning Apple can’t access it at all.

But in this case, Kohler do (according to Fondrie-Teitler’s research) have access to their users’ data, including the ability to de-anonymize consenting users’ data for use in AI training. I submitted this point to the Kohler spokesperson in a follow-up question and am awaiting a response.

In an interview with 404 Media, Fondrie-Teitler says Kohler Health’s claims undermine the very meaning of end-to-end encryption, which, by Cloudflare’s definition, is “a type of messaging that keeps messages private from everyone, including the messaging service.”

“I would like to see the term ‘end-to-end encryption’ not watered down to just mean ‘use https,'” Fondrie-Teitler said in the 404 Media article. “I think everyone has a right to privacy, and for that to happen, people need to understand what’s happening with their data.”