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 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.
Any new term you come up with, will end up being misused by marketers.
I have never seen "e2ee" abused this way personally.
Zoom also did this once
They also paid me something around 100 dollars in settlement for this
Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, iCloud
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
“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.
It was pretty common to call client-side encryption/SSL "end to end encryption" among network engineers who were analyzing data flowing through their networks[0] as well as those who were implementing SSL/TLS into their applications[1]. The ends were the client and the server and the data was encrypted "end to end". The goal at that time was to prevent MITM snooping/attacks which were highly prevalent at the time.
Papers in academia and the greater industry[2] also referred to it in this way at the time.
Stack Overflow has plenty of examples of folks calling it "end to end encryption" and you can start to see the time period after the Signal protocol and WhatsApp implemented it that the term started to take on a much wider meaning[4]
This also came up a lot in the context of games that rolled out client side encryption for packets on the way to the server. Folks would run MITM applications on their computer to intercept game packets coming out of the client and back from the server. Clever mechanisms were setup for key management and key exchange[3].
[0] as SSL became more common lots of tooling broke at the network level around packet inspection, routing, caching, etc. As well as engineers "having fun" on Friday nights looking at what folks were looking at.
[1] Stack Overflow's security section has references from that era
[2] "Encrypting the internet" (2010) - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1851275.1851200
[3] Habbo Hotel's prime and generator being hidden in one of the dynamic images fetched from the server as well as their DH mechanism comes to mind.
[4] Jabber/XMPP however used E2EE in the more modern sense around that time as they were exploring going beyond TLS and having true E2EE.
At least in some circles, the real meaning of "end-to-end encryption" was being addressed. For example, in the field of credit card processing, here's an article from 2009 which talks about how people back then were misusing the term: https://web.archive.org/web/20090927092231/http://informatio...
Granted, it's a marketing piece trying to sell a product, but still.
I wasn't a network engineer, but to my recollection "end-to-end encryption" was only used occasionally, probably by people not too knowledgeable in cryptography
Well respectfully your recollection is missing lots of references by people that were "knowledgeable in cryptography".
You can easily find these references in the literature, often comparing link encryption with end-to-end encryption. Some of the earliest papers outlining the plans for SSL in the 90s (Analysis of the SSL 3.0 Protocol) are based on this exact foundation from the 80s (End-To-End Arguments in System Design).
Hell, you can even go back to 1978 and see MITRE discussing this exact thing in "Limitations of end-to-end encryption in secure computer networks".
The two endpoints of the communication with Kohler's app are the client and the server. In WhatsApp's E2EE implementation the endpoints are two client devices. Both are valid meanings of E2EE. You're defining that "end to end" means the server cannot access it but that's simply not what it means.
The modern usage of E2EE definitely means that "the server cannot access it". That's the meat of this entire discussion.
While you are technically correct in a network topology sense (where the "ends" are the TCP connection points), that definition has been obsolete in consumer privacy contexts for a decade now due to "true" E2EE encryption.
If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server. But we don't call them E2EE because the service provider holds the keys and can see the data.
In 2025, when a company claims a camera product is "E2EE", a consumer interprets that to mean "Zero Knowledge". I.e. the provider cannot see the video feeds. If Kohler holds the keys to analyze the data, that is Encryption in Transit, not E2EE. Even though in an older sense (which is what my original comment was saying), it was "End to End Encrypted" because the two ends were defined as Client and Server and not Client to Client (e.g. FB Messenger User1 and FB Messenger User2).
> If we use your definition, then Gmail, Facebook, and Amazon are all "End-to-End Encrypted" because the traffic is encrypted between my client and their server.
That may or may not be the case. TLS is always terminated at a load balancer that uses TLS but it's still common to use HTTP within datacenters. So it may not be E2EE and it's a meaningful security feature.
No term will stop marketers from lying. If users see one as being the more secure one, marketers will use it. Unless they get sued for false advertising.
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?”
> 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?
Every front end needs a rear end. So, yes.
While they’re taking one “end” much less literally than usual, they are taking the other “end” much more literally…
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.
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.
I would argue it depends on context. E2EE means it's encrypted until the "target" receives it. For a messaging protocol, it's the intended recipient of the message. For what the person you're replying is discussing, the intended recipient IS the bank.
That being said, the person you're replying to seems to be saying that "the server" is always an "intended" end, which is wrong.
No, it doesn't depend on context. The intended recipient of a financial transaction is not the bank. The intended recipient is the party you're trying to pay. It is possible for financial transactions to be E2EE and completely indecipherable by anyone but the two parties of the transaction. Crypto like ZCash can do it. Banks cannot.
Can you expand on this a bit. It was my understanding that you're telling the bank to pay the vendor (from your money/credit). In that case, the bank certainly needs to know about the transaction... so it can make the payment.
Are we talking about 2 different things here?
I suggest researching how ZCash uses zero-knowledge proofs to allow paying money from your balance to another person's balance without any middleman like a bank being able to decrypt your transaction, while still allowing everyone to verify that important invariants are maintained, such as not allowing you to spend more money than you have.
This is what it takes to make a financial transaction E2EE. I'm not saying that banks could or should do this. I'm just saying that their systems do not qualify as E2EE unless they do. It's not ambiguous.
Doesn't the anonymous-ness of crypto/zcash make it impossible for the bank to handle fraud (reversing of charges and such)?
My understanding is that banks, at least in the US, need to have fairly extensive knowledge relating to all transfers of money, both for fraud handling and for non-fraud (money laundering, etc). A transaction they can't know anything about other than "transfer X money to some recipient you can't know anything about" just doesn't seem realistic with the regulations involved.
Plus, even "transfer X money to some recipient you can't know anything about" is a message that you're sending _to_ the bank, that they have to be able to decode and read. And, presumably, you'd encrypt that message and expect the bank to decrypt it.
Honestly, I don't understand what argument is that you're not sending a message TO the bank, and they need to be able to read it in order to act on it, and they need to decrypt it to read it. The bank is the target of the message, they are one of the "ends" in E2EE.
I feel like I need an "Explain this like I'm 5", because clearly you believe differently than me... and I don't understand _how_ it can be otherwise.
While what you're saying makes sense, it's not the normal use of the term - in fact, the term 'end to end encryption' was basically coined to differentiate user-to-user encryption (through an intermediary service that can't decrypt the message) from the regular case (user to service encryption) that you're talking about!
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.
Anyone reading that is misunderstanding what E2EE means. As the article says, that's client-side encryption. Kohler isn't lying, people are confusing two different security features.
That is an uncommon interpretation that’s far different than the usual meaning.
Doesn't that just mean HTTPS then?
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.
And the heat from the processor(s) would make for a comfy user experience in the wintertime.
Only for the very well endowed since it points down. Though hopefully they're doing something other than let their bits dangle in the toilet water.
>Otherwise who else would process it to give any health results back?
Well it could be processed on-device.
That would only work after they're done training the ai models.
So like after the alpha and beta phases, when they have an actual product worthy of selling?
> 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
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.
It’s pretty impressive that that juicero thing wasn’t the most bizarre thing they could come up with.
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.
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.
They claim it only points about your doings, but even then...
Satire is dead. A toilet company killed it.
Could easily have been an SNL sketch in 2010
Smart Pipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
This obsession with personal health data collection is in its self counter productive to health outcomes and insane behavior.
They can encrypt data coming out of both ends?!
> 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.
congratulations, you have lived to see man made horrors beyond your comprehension
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!!!"
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).
IP address, device identifier, mother's maiden name, SSN, etc etc
You mean the I-Pee address? Sorry, y'all, I gotta get it out in this thread, it's too easy.
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?
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.
"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.
The same thing we always do. Pay some citizens of an African nation a pitiful wage to just make up annotations.
Then you can incorporate this into a "health care product" and charge insurance companies insane rates on personal toilet cameras.
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.
They probably do match it, with data collected from other sources
?? 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.
> 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.
That is what "end-to-end encryption" has come to mean in marketing. In the same way that every single product is "natural."
No, they're just trying to mislead their clients
I'm so sorry for the people who work on this and have to look at the data.
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.
some poor soul has to do train this AI. Imagine your job is categorizing pictures of poop
Kohler is a registered sex offender.
What. Who is buying a $600 camera to take pictures of your stool?
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.
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.
Yeah I hate to kill the party but if you can’t imagine a need for this product, consider yourself blessed. GI issues are not pleasant.
An ADA toilet at Home Depot is $300 so even the price isn’t that outrageous, honestly. It’s a unique niche product so it’s gonna be a little bit pricey.
I don’t know, it just feels a bit gauche to make jokes about a medical device. Nobody’s buying this unless they need it, and if they need it then best of luck to them.
Which GI issues are currently only medically manageable with a camera in your toilet bowl, and how were people managing them before?
It's the idea of buying it that's nonsensical. I'm not sure how you could realistically use this thing long term. Someone has to sort through the data, spot trends, and offer competent advice. Presumably once you have your diet under control then there is no further need of this bowl level analysis.
If you continue to have GI issues anyways, perhaps due to genetic causes, then what is constant surveillance of the situation -- at $7,200/year -- going to improve?
Assuming you're appropriately sighted, you don't need a $600 toilet cam to tell you if you're dehydrated.
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.
Don't forget the subscription fee
So they made Google TISP?
To me it reminds me of Smart Pipe.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> > For normal people E2EE means privacy > > It's misunderstood.
Not in my experience, except by very few
> But later some marketers try to use it as a "transport channel" for client-server interactions.
Some, still few enough to not make the term confusing, for what I can tell
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.]
Huh what could possibly go wrong here?
>https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/world/asia/south-korea-ca...
Oh...
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.
The theranos of toilets
Did they say which ends they meant?
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.
> 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
> 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.
Features fully secure e2mitm2ee.
Holy fuck they actually built Smart Pipe[1]
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
#itsmyanus
What exactly is the toilet camera for? Are they taking pictures of your daily bowel movements?
"end to end" I see what you did there.
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.
No pictures were shown on the website.
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.
Enshittification has gone too far.
I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
Hi, who just joined?
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.
Look on the bright side: you can tell people you were simply ahead of your time!
I believe it is called "reddit"
Apotheosis of enshitification.
> collects images and data from inside, promising to track and provide insights on gut health, hydration, and more
cough bullshit.
Enshittification.
What I want to know is who is taking pictures of their poop like this? There has to be a better way.
AI enshitification. Literally.