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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

Wait until we've got smart toilets analyzing our poop and pee everywhere we go.

Then there will truly be nowhere to hide.

In 2003 I installed a scale in our dorm toilet. When you sat down you push a button and when done you push it again. If you were in the top five you could enter your (three letter max) name using a two button system. Top five were displayed using a super low resolution screen similar to a pinball high score screen.

Don't be shy, give us the top score list

POO, TRD, SHT, ASS, and TED

Poor Ted needed more fiber.

I am curious as to how the scale was installed.

I think it was just a regular scale that you step on, not mounted into the toilet

Oh, duh, that would make more sense.

Sensors under the seat I'm guessing.

This only makes sense to me if everyone poops with their legs in the air, and does not hold onto anything for support.

lotsofpulp

Hmm. May I recommend switching to a less...abrasive fiber supplement? You might be able to relax your protocol a smidge if you do.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) in September 2020. CDC developed NWSS to coordinate and build the nation’s capacity to track the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wastewater samples collected across the country.

https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance.html

Which is not particularly personally invasive and is a great tool.

The thing with the cryptic infection in Ohio was maybe personally invasive (but as far as I know, no PII has been revealed): https://www.darkdaily.com/?p=43174

"All waste samples were thoroughly anoymized".

I make no judgement about its invasiveness or usefulness. A possible future is for this monitoring to go further upstream to become more personalized and cross boundaries into other monitoring domains, as other comments noted many pharmaceutical products or metabolites can be detected in human waste.

Possibly something holding practical implementations back is all the other waste put into sewage, which may stop things up in the manner of “fatbergs.” [0]

A related idea I have percolating is to change municipal composting programs from bins and trucks to grind and pipe by deploying more sink fixtures that grind food materials into small pieces so they go thru the drain. Then focus extracting/separating biological materials from other effluvium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg

Governments were doing that kind of sampling before Covid too, eg for drugs.

https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/study-tracks-illicit-dr...

Sooner than you think: https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-designed-a-smart-...

On a slightly less dystopian note, I can't wait for the DefCon talk on spoofing anus prints

Are we sure this wasn't posted 8 days late?

Why stop at toilets?

https://supercombodeluxe.com/gmen/

That may already be a thing (garbage weighing) somewhere. There was a trial where residents were be billed by the weight of their garbage. The trial involved adding QR codes to the bins and an adapted garbage truck that weighed the bin and read the QR code upon disposal. I don't know what happened after the trial (or if they had an incognito mode).

There's places where your tax amount depends on how much trash by weight you produce. I know people in some of those cities that drive their trash to the next town over and avoid paying.

It's currently operated in Dublin. Barcode on back of each of 3 bins (recyclables, non-recyclables and organic). Recyclables and organic are free, and non-recyclables includes a quota of x kg per month included in your monthly fee. You pay extra per kg if you go over the quota for non-recyclables in any month. The system encourages recycling, but at the risk of people contaminating the (free) recyclables bin with non recyclable material.

> Wait until we've got smart toilets analyzing our poop and pee everywhere we go.

I'm hacking on a local-only, slurp-every-data-point-about-myself program, and I missed adding a analyzer for feces and urine! Thanks for sharing your sarcasm :)

I work in microbiology lab automation. Setting up automated culturing shouldn't be out of reach with the tech available to ordinary people today, but it will smell pretty bad.

I distinctly remember seeing a TV personality in France (Jérome Bonaldi, for fellow French people on HN) presenting, in the 90s, Japanese toilets that did that.

20+ years later, I live in Japan and they're nowhere to be found (thankfully)

Hey, some of us like French people

I read that novel... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_(novel)

Pooping in the woods will be made illegal as it avoids government tracking.

Smart Pipe is a registered sex offender

https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ

Thank you for this. I figured someone had to.

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