“Smart” toilets are a privacy nightmare.

Having said that, in the distant future, if we don’t drown the world, or kill ourselves in some other way, smart toilets are actually a smart idea.

Look how often a medical check-up requires either a stool sample or a urine sample. It makes sense. It’s the waste products our body produces, so there’s going to be a lot of data there. Now, imagine if you could get a basic medical check-up every time you used the toilet. You could catch so many problems early. It would be an entirely non-invasive medical check-up and if done right you wouldn’t even need to change your routine. You’d just use the toilet as normal and if the toilet detected anything that required a more detailed check, it could give you a packet of data you could give to your doctor.

At the very least, imagine if instead of trying to pee into a cup at the doctor’s office – or worse, trying to collect a stool sample, you could just use the “Medical Toilet” the way you use any other toilet and it would collect the sample for you.

But, of course, the wealth of medical information it could provide is exactly why it would be a privacy nightmare in the current world. I don’t know why Kohler is jumping into this now. Even if they see it as some way to generate revenue, they have to know it’s going to generate lawsuits too, and when inevitably there’s a privacy breach it’s going to put their good name in the toilet.