Turns out, Kohler’s R10,000 toilet camera uses pretty crappy encryption

Kohler, the company behind the Dekoda toilet camera and several other smart toilet gadgets, appears to have fallen short of its claimed “end-to-end encryption”. Unless it meant that it can see your rear end from its end, in which case, they were being largely honest.

Okay, so you might not wind up with pictures of your butthole on the internet as a result of the smart device maker’s security issues, but since the company “can access the data stored on its servers” from its toilet cameras, somebody could well get a gander at… something. And then use it to train AI.

It’d be a lot Kohler if you did

Engineer Simon Fondrie-Teitler took apart the company’s claims that it uses end-to-end encryption to keep details of its toilet-inspection cam captures secretive, pointing out that “contrary to common understanding of the term—Kohler is able to access data collected by the device and associated application.” This data can, and explicitly will be used to train AI.

Fondrie-Teitler says that, rather than the end-to-end encryption companies like Meta use to conceal your messages from prying eyes, the smart toilet company is doing… something else. Kohler itself explains to Fondrie-Teitler that “User data is encrypted at rest, when it’s stored on the user’s mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems.  Data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user’s devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service.”

The company also pointed out that it’ll be conducting AI training with “de-identified data”, something that users have to agree to when they purchase and set up a Dekoda camera. The camera’s systems are set up to “protect identifiable images from access by Kohler Health employees through a combination of data encryption, technical safeguards, and governance controls.” But the security protocol keeping an eye on your hovering rear end isn’t end-to-end encrypted.

Whether you’re willing to put up with that crap from a R10,000 smart camera (and a minimum R1,200 monthly subscription) is up to you.