Heed This Warning Before You Consider Buying A Smart Toilet

In today's digital age, it's becoming increasingly common to utilize smart appliances in the home and add smart home technology to your property. Surveys have found that roughly half of American households employ at least one smart device. While you may not think twice about smart televisions, speakers, and home security devices like doorbells, what about smart toilets? These devices have bidet-like features such as spray cleansing, motion sensor closing and opening lids, night lights, and heated seats. However, smart toilets are currently being developed with additional health monitoring features. While there are several benefits of using smart toilets for health monitoring, they're not without risks — specifically when it comes to your privacy.

The idea behind these toilets is that they could help catch diseases sooner or monitor patients with known health issues. Smart toilets with health monitoring features can analyze and test the contents of your toilet for diseases like cancer, check for signs of kidney failure, monitor glucose levels in diabetics, and more. These tests are run by sensors within the toilet, and in some models, monitoring may even be done using cameras. If the toilets flag anything unusual, they could alert the user or send the information to healthcare providers. While that may sound great in theory, there's definitely a catch. The smart toilets now in development will store the information they collect in the cloud. Unfortunately, this is not a foolproof system, as cloud data breaches are quite common.

One developer of smart toilets for medical research claims that the data collected will be anonymized before being sent to and stored in the cloud. Another researcher working on the project asserts that the "data from a smart toilet would be held to the same storage and privacy standards as the health data collected at a doctor's office" (via Stanford Medicine). However, no online information is guaranteed to be safe from hackers, which means you may want to steer clear of data-collecting smart toilets if creating more privacy in your home is a priority. Keep in mind that as of this writing, the vast majority of available models do not have this capability, and the ones that do will likely require a subscription fee for monitoring.

There's no firm answer on exactly how likely it is for your data to be leaked from the cloud. However, the risk may be higher than you think. Cloud data breaches are currently growing year by year, and since the data collected by health-monitoring smart toilets is inherently personal and sensitive, the prevalence of these breaches is not something to take lightly. While these gadgets potentially have some amazing benefits, they're not without their risks, and you should weigh those carefully before deciding if these types of smart toilets are worth it.