You won’t be safe anywhere! What would you say if you were filmed in the toilet? An American startup has developed an artificial intelligence that analyzes stool and urine through a camera in your toilet. Objective: To find out about your health problems. Even if the intention is admirable, we may wonder if we will really be saying goodbye to our private lives in this hyper-connected society.
For your safety, your comfort and even your health, with just one click, you can now control your home environment. If home automation has simplified the daily lives of millions of people, it has also affected a fairly sacred concept: that of privacy. As you have seen, as soon as we use a digital service, we present our personal data to Platter. So imagine all the information we make available by installing connected devices in our homes, as close to our privacy as possible!
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Finally, do we still have personal lives? Because increasingly intrusive gadgets keep emerging to improve our daily lives. Recently, we can also present the example of Arsh, an artificial intelligence that analyzes excrement and urine using a camera placed in your toilet bowl. Amazing! The device promises to detect health problems such as lack of hydration, bowel disorders or chronic diseases such as Crohn’s disease. ColitisColitis Ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome.
At the moment, the Throne is in the prototype stage and will cost around 460 euros to install in your home. This doctor-designed artificial intelligence has the same mission as all connected devices in the home: to offer an experience that is as personalized as possible. And as always, there are good and bad sides to this, because if Thorne manages to inform its users about their health, the AI can collect a whole bunch of other data at the same time. Because the service is connected to the smartphone, which itself is connected to a multitude of objects in the home. In addition, a camera placed in the toilet can provide extensive information about your schedule, your habits, your lifestyle… data that today is relevant to sleep and that, for example, personal nutrition. Thrawn can help provide advice on or in the case of a leak, to be used by people with ill intentions.
The throne in France?
Clearly, cameras fit into every corner, even the most unusual. If Arsh is currently only available in the United States, could it be exported to France? Well, it’s not impossible. If according to the CNIL it is prohibited to install cameras in public places and inside fitting rooms and toilets in private establishments, the regulations regarding the private sphere are more flexible. In fact, property law only allows you to film inside your home on the condition that you don’t violate the privacy of the people being filmed.
The CNIL informs that, for this, it is necessary to warn all persons of the presence of the cameras as well as the purpose of their presence, in the case where the device is used outside a strictly private context ( when you use an external company, for example). According to the GDPR definition, personal data is “any information relating to an individual. The bodyThe body Identified or Recognizable”, knowing whether a person can be identified directly (by their first and last name) or indirectly, for example by photograph.
The company behind Thorn says it doesn’t photograph people, only the contents of their toilet bowls. According to their “Privacy and Security” page, the camera will be pointed at the bowl. The startup also emphasizes that any data that is not relevant to its mission could compromise its ability to provide accurate information about the health of its customers. In other words, your image, according to them, will have no interest in being captured, quite the opposite. The Throne, according to its designers, will use facial recognition technology that will allow it to automatically remove all irrelevant images.
In fact, only toilet related data will be kept. Data to be encrypted by TLSTLS 1.2, or higher, on ServersServers of the company. Additionally, to reassure its customers, the American startup has promised to process their data honestly. TransparencyTransparency and undertakes to transfer or delete collected images at the request of its users. Ultimately, even if organizations do their best to preserve our privacy, it becomes increasingly difficult to protect it.
