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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
?? 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 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 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!?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have never seen "e2ee" abused this way personally.
Any new term you come up with, will end up being misused by marketers.
“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.
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).
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.
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?”
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.
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?
> 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?
While they’re taking one “end” much less literally than usual, they are taking the other “end” much more literally…
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
I'm so sorry for the people who work on this and have to look at the data.
They can encrypt data coming out of both ends?!
Even (especially?) for its stated purpose, this is cursed technology.
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.
This obsession with personal health data collection is in its self counter productive to health outcomes and insane behavior.
How does one "train" an AI with a flood of random toilet pictures and no corresponding medical data to match it with?
"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.
They probably do match it, with data collected from other sources
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.
?? 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
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.
Kohler is a registered sex offender.
congratulations, you have lived to see man made horrors beyond your comprehension
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.
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.
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.
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd07dprln9o
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.]
So they made Google TISP?
https://archive.google/tisp/index.html
To me it reminds me of Smart Pipe.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
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.
Did they say which ends they meant?
I’m sorry the shit had hit the fan at Kohler, but there’s no reason a cloud poop camera even exists.
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.
Holy fuck they actually built Smart Pipe[1]
1: https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ?si=bSRE2lOqwwm1Q_D9
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
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.
Hi, who just joined?
Apotheosis of enshitification.
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.
Enshittification.