{"id":7496,"date":"2014-04-30T08:20:48","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T12:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=7496"},"modified":"2014-04-30T08:21:33","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T12:21:33","slug":"our-privacy-is-goes-down-the-drain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/our-privacy-is-goes-down-the-drain\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Privacy Going Down the Drain?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What a Toilet Hoax Can Tell Us About the Future of Surveillance<\/h1>\n
A made-up toilet company raises legitimate questions about government data-tracking.<\/div>\n
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Reuters<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

I wasn’t actually surprised to learn that public officials in Toronto had agreed to install “smart toilets” in the city’s convention center so they could analyze public, um, data.\u00a0As a privacy researcher, the idea fascinated me.<\/p>\n

Only problem: It wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

But a fake toilet company\u2019s publicity stunt has me thinking, which is whatQuantified Toilets<\/a>\u00a0intended. Smart toilets are just the kind of product you expect to encounter at the\u00a0ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing<\/a>, or CHI, an annual event where researchers discuss the latest science of how people interact with technology.\u00a0This is my favorite conference to attend. There are always new and cool projects that make me think.<\/p>\n

So when\u00a0Quantified Toilets<\/a>\u00a0debuted at CHI this week, it was an immediate hit. The company claimed to have installed sensors in the Toronto Convention Center and other civic venues that would automatically analyze \u201cdeposits\u201d in the toilets to detect a person\u2019s gender, drug and alcohol levels, pregnancy status, sexually-transmitted-infection status, and\u2026 smell.<\/p>\n

There were signs in the bathrooms that read: \u201cBehavior at these toilets is being recorded for analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The accompanying website featured a\u00a0live stream\u00a0(ha) of toilet data being collected in real time.<\/p>\n

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The idea isn\u2019t as absurd as it may sound, especially to a cohort of conference attendees who spend their days thinking about these sorts of technologies. \u201cSmart toilets\u201d have been around for a while, and in a survey by Intel and market researcher Penn Schoen Berland,\u00a070% of people said they would be willing to share their smart toilet data if it led to lower healthcare costs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this was different. And it’s worth exploring why…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest at The Atlantic.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What a Toilet Hoax Can Tell Us About the Future of Surveillance A made-up toilet company raises legitimate questions about government data-tracking. Reuters I wasn’t actually surprised to learn that public officials in Toronto had agreed to install “smart toilets” in the city’s convention center so they could analyze public, um, data.\u00a0As a privacy researcher, the idea fascinated\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1426],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7496"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7499,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496\/revisions\/7499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}