Food, Security

Do People Dump Too Much Privacy Using Smart Toilets?

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The key context to consider with smart toilets is whether they enhance or detract from data analysis already being done at the block-level, let alone in bulk wastewater treatment analysis.

In other words, does generating more client-side analysis of human output (dare I call it log analysis) benefit the individual relative to having it done already on the service-side?

I’ve given presentations about this since at least 2012, where I warned how encryption and key management were central to protecting the privacy of toilet dumps (of data).

Anyway, fast forward a decade later and the WSJ wants you to believe that all this old debate is somehow a new topic being figured out by none other than the genocidal brand of Stanford.

The next frontier of at-home health tracking is flush with data: the toilet. Researchers and companies are developing high-tech toilets that go beyond adding smart speakers or a heated seat. These smart facilities are designed to look out for signs of gastrointestinal disease, monitor blood pressure or tell you that you need to eat more fish, all from the comfort of your personal throne.

Let me just make a few more points about Stanford ethical gaps, given the WSJ reports they are using Korea to manufacture their design into an entire toilet (instead of a more sensible sensor attachment, plumbing product, or a seat modification).

The Stanford team has signed an agreement with Izen, a Korean toilet maker, to manufacture the toilet. They hope to have working prototypes that can be used in clinical trials by the end of this year, says Seung-min Park, who leads the project, which was started by Sanjiv Gambhir, the former chair of radiology at Stanford, who died in 2020.

First, toilets are semi-permanent and rarely upgraded or replaced, so such a technology shift is a terrible idea from both a privacy and interoperability/freedom perspective. A vulnerability in the toilet design is a very expensive mistake, unlike a seat, sensor or plumbing change.

Second, of course Stanford did not go to Japan (arguably a country that is world leader in toilets alone as well as satiation technology) because the Japanese would have laughed Stanford out of the room for “inventing” something already decades old.

Look at this April 2013 news from Toto, for example:

An “Intelligence Toilet” system, created by Japan’s largest toilet company, Toto, can measure sugar levels in urine, blood pressure, heart rate, body fat and weight. The results are sent from the toilet to a doctor by an internet-capable cellular phone built into the toilet. Through long distance monitoring, doctors can chart a person’s physical well-being.

Or let’s look all the way back to May 2009 news, perhaps?

Toto’s newest smart john, the Intelligence Toilet II, is proving that it is more than an ordinary porcelain throne by recording and analyzing important data like weight, BMI, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels.

There’s a “sample catcher” in the bowl that can obtain urine samples. Even by Japanese standards that’s impressive. Yes it has the bidet, the air dryer, and heated seat, but it’s also recording pertinent information.

This information is beamed to your computer via WiFi and can help you, with the guidance of a trained physician, monitor health and provide early detection for some medical conditions.

The Japanese company Toto, a world-leading brand in toilets, is thus easily credited in the actual news with having these toilets available for purchase in the early 2000s. Definitely NOT new.

Even a world-recognizable Japanese technology company had had intelligent toilet sensors on the market for years already.

In September 2018, electronics giant Panasonic released a health-tracking toilet in China that tests the urine for blood, protein, and other key health indicators. The device also uses sensors embedded in an armrest to measure a person’s body fat and identify different users by scanning their fingerprints.

That’s a really good insight into why Stanford went to Korea to make a knock-off of Japanese designs — failed to partner with a Japanese company to design and release something that has been designed and released already for over a decade.

All this speaks to the weird relationship that American academic institutions have with journalists who publish unverified puff and PR instead of actual news.

Stanford somehow gets away with this regularly, along with brandishing a name that represents crimes against humanity.

Anyway, here are just some of my old slides from 2013, including examples for discussion of privacy technology for toilets well as some data from places like Chicago doing analysis of drug usage (illegal/counterfeit) on wastewater.

And I guess I also should mention in 2019 I wrote about all this with the title “Yet More Shit AI“.

Security

Governance Always Has Been About “Nudge” Behavior Economics

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The Guardian gets part of their history right in a new article about government use of political theory and economics:

British government’s fondness for minor behavioural modification tactics began in the David Cameron era…

Indeed, you may recall in 2014 we hosted a discussion on exactly that topic:

…interface between economics and political science in health care policy analysis… [for the] “Behavioural Public Policy“ an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and its relevance to public policy.

However, I find it interesting that the article doesn’t realize the London School of Economics itself was practically founded on the principles of nudge based on personal data to influence citizens.

And that was based on principles going back at least to the 1700s.

Source: flyingpenguin

Studying this in proper long-term history helps explain why so much of WWI and WWII has evidence of the British government’s fondness for minor behavior modification tactics, let alone during its colonial exploits — all frequent topics of this blog.

Security

Tesla Learning is Oxymoronic: Autopilot is Unsafe

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In May of this year Tesla bizarrely announced against common sense that it would remove radar from its “vision” system for autonomous driving.

It’s a dumb move by a car company that only will cause more crashes and deaths.

Safety is at the core of our design and engineering decisions. In 2021, we began our transition to Tesla Vision by removing radar…

Their announcement reads to me like disinformation, an intentional misrepresentation. When they say safety is at their core, they actually mean a lack of it.

Now Arbe is mentioned in an interesting new article with some subtle shade:

…typical radar systems may struggle to properly identify objects passing under a bridge or overhead signage…

This needs to be seen in context of the Florida crash that killed Tesla driver Jeremy Brown. Remember the big news in 2016 for the second Tesla fatality due to its “autopilot”?

The engineers have two main theories, the people said. Either the car’s cameras and radar failed to spot a crossing tractor-trailer. Or the cameras didn’t see the rig and the car’s computer thought the radar signal was false, possibly from an overpass or sign.

Tesla officials disclosed these theories to U.S. Senate Commerce Committee staff members during an hour-long meeting…

It turns out Tesla safety “trained” mainly on roads around California where overhead signs look just like trailers crossing the road, and then baked that into a very rudimentary system.

They repeatedly crash into the side of trailers because they think it’s a stationary object above the road, instead of properly seeing a danger directly in the way.

Even more to that point, when a trailer starts moving left to right (perpendicular to oncoming Tesla path) the Tesla tracks the trailer and also shifts to the right to drive underneath as if a straight road ahead instead was suddenly curving to the right.

And now Tesla has admitted publicly its engineers do not use continuous learning, or really any field-learning because it makes their jobs harder, which explains why it keeps making that same basic fatal error over and over without improvement.

…we haven’t done too much continuous learning. We train the system once, fine tune it a few times and that sort of goes into the car. We need something stable that we can evaluate extensively and then we think that that is good and that goes into cars. So we don’t do too much learning on the spot or continuous learning…

Here’s even more context on that point, Tesla’s bombastic and serial liar CEO has gone 180 degrees from claiming to be the best at learning safety to being unable to learn, as I explained in my recent security conference presentation:

Ford Pinto Deaths? 27

Tesla Deaths: 207
Tesla Autopilot Deaths: 10

Update May 2024 (three years later):

Tesla Deaths: 523
Tesla Autopilot Deaths: 44

History, Security

Robert Carter’s 1791 Blueprint for American Abolition of Slavery

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Carter was opposed to slavery among many others who felt the same. Virginia’s 1782 General Assembly passed “An act to authorize the manumission of slaves” and Carter did just that, as you can see here. Source: Virginia Encyclopedia

A man well known to Washington and Jefferson, Robert Carter III, freed all his own slaves while those two “great men” dithered and did nothing of the kind.

Chattel slavery was wrong, the men said, but they supposedly worried it was not practical to abolish the institution without societal and economic consequences. “As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other,” Jefferson wrote a fellow politician almost 30 years after Carter’s deed of gift. Yet Carter had provided them a blueprint, not only for freeing their slaves but for ensuring the freedmen could sustain themselves, even prosper and integrate into society.

Again, this man was no stranger to the Americans expanding and preserving slavery; he showed them true leadership and removed their excuses for tyranny.

He counted Washington’s half-brother, Lawrence, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson as friends; he regularly dined with and loaned money to the latter. Washington himself was a neighbor, and Robert E. Lee’s mother was the great granddaughter of his grandfather, Robert “King” Carter.

And again, we’re talking about 1791, the year he decided to go all in on the abolition of slavery.

Carter also allowed the freedmen to choose their last names so they could keep families together and pass down wealth. He ensured they had salable skills, arranged for them to buy or lease land, and bought their wares. He also spent a great deal on transporting them from his plantations to the Northumberland courthouse, and on lawyers to guarantee his heirs — some none too happy he was paring their inheritance — didn’t undo his wishes.
“Carter’s plans look more like a pilot for mass emancipation,” Andrew Levy, a professor at Butler University, told CNN.

Technically it was 55 years after Britain had abolished slavery in their 1735 regulation for colonization of Georgia, and 15 years after the independent agrarian state of Vermont had declared its abolition.

Even more to the point it came after the Stono rebellion of 1739, where whites were ordered to carry guns while denying blacks the same right (to prevent blacks from achieving liberty). White colonials of South Carolina then wrote a law ordering blacks in America no longer “grow their own food, assemble in groups, earn their own money, or learn to read”.

Carter wasn’t early in abolition, he was late and among a large crowd growing to end slavery, but he stands out because his story proves the very high degree of hypocrisy of pro-slavery men like Washington and Jefferson.

Of all the reasons Americans do not teach about Carter in history classes, the following two are very compelling.

…the manumission was so deeply unpopular — neighbors complained, and one threatened to torch Carter’s home — it didn’t compel much documentation. A brief in a Richmond newspaper constitutes the bulk of the coverage.
Levy, whose books include a biography of Carter, “The First Emancipator,” has another suspicion: America doesn’t care — because it’s inconvenient.
“It blows an enormous hole in this legacy we’re trying to balance for these founders,” he said.

It does blow an enormous hole in the narratives told about Washington and Jefferson. As I often say, people like to say Washington died because of bad weather while he sat on his horse watching his slaves… yet nobody ever mentions what happened to those slaves he was keeping in that same weather.