That Most Intimate of Thrones
There’s a very famous couples counseling researcher named Dr John Gottman. You might have heard of him- he and his wife have published many books on marriage and relationships, and he famously proved time and again that with one brief session he could predict with 93% accuracy whether a couple would divorce within the next 4 years.
I’ve used some of his methods, but the thing I most vividly remember learning about him in graduate school is his “love lab.”
Over the course of decades, he and his fellow researchers studied over 3000 couples. One of their main methods involved inviting their research subjects to semi-vacations in very special apartments. Subjects were told all about how they would be monitored, they were compensated, and then they were studied in ways I never would have thought of.
Not only was their every interaction filmed from multiple angles and then coded by experts- that much is fairly common in psych research- at times they would be hooked up to pulse monitors. Every chair had a sensor under it that measured how much it was jiggled or fidgeted in.
There was more, but the one that got me was the toilets. The toilets measured stress hormones in urine. Then all this data was synced up and compiled with the recordings to measure what exactly was going on internally. The idea was, more or less, to get a picture of how different types of interactions impacted people, and pair that with relational outcomes.
This led to the kind of research that suggests kissing for 6 seconds or hugging for 20 seconds to make sure you stimulate necessary levels of oxytocin.
I only mean to poke fun a little bit. They also developed a lot of very actionable suggestions about how exactly to connect with your partner, and their therapies have pretty solid results, even if they aren't without their drawbacks. And their self-help books are very accessible.
The funny thing is, I was just going to use this factoid as a segue into the next installment of my series of newsletters about smart homes and security systems- this time on biometric data. I’m doing a lot of research right now into smart homes use of biometric data, as part of my outlining Scrapped Gods (book 3 in the Second Sentinels series).
I’m going to be honest. The reason this month’s Shed Letters is late is because I wanted to say “I don’t think people are going to be installing stress-hormone-monitoring toilets in their homes” after this anecdote.
But then I thought maybe I should just do a quick search first.
And. Well. I guess I was being naive.
Turns out the smart toilets of tomorrow (and to an extent, today) are poised to collect way more medical data than Gottman had in the Love Lab.
It’s not like I don’t get the point! There is a ton of incredibly useful information that can come from a stool or urine sample and getting medical monitoring out of something you have to do multiple times a day anyways makes a lot of sense.
There are researchers building toilets that test fairly straightforward things, like hydration and “flow”. But also white blood cell count. There are toilets being built for bladder cancer screening, for checking white blood cell count. There are toilets built for collecting information comparable to the waste-water screening many of us have used to track covid rates, with the intention to create a tracking system for future large scale pathogen tracking. Unsurprisingly, there are toilets in development that will test for pregnancy.
The medical toilets that are already around are, of course, prohibitively expensive for many, but we all know that with new tech what's expensive and rare now may become standard and omnipresent down the line.
Every article I’ve found about these lavatory laboratories has made at least a side comment about how of course, privacy is a key factor in ethical development of such technology. I agree.
Imagine the risk posed by a pregnancy testing toilet in a red state. Or even within an abusive relationship.
Still, I suspect that most people who don’t obsess about these things would laugh and wonder why anyone would want to hack your toilet. Which is fair. I mean I could see hacking celebrities toilet data becoming a TikTok craze or something but overall I don't see that as a likely a threat to society.
And the fist line of defense is, frankly, very elegant. A fingerprint sensor in the flusher that acts as a password, which triggers the toilet to send the collected data to a private health account you can check with a login.
However. I think we’d better change some laws and some norms real quick before smart toilets turn ubiquitous. Some of you will remember my previous post about the current state of medical data privacy law in the US, and how badly it’s lagged behind the realities of modern technology.
In addition to the risk to data privacy posed by police, CPS, and corporations mining your data to sell to the highest bidder, I want to highlight another potential interested party who might want access to your dookie data- your insurance company.
With more and more devices being used to assist human health- which, again, I am in favor of- insurance companies have found a new way to monitor people for new reasons to deny care. For example, say you have a CPAP to help you breathe while you sleep. You’re probably leasing the device through a medical supply company, because they are spendy and need replacement parts often.
There are plenty of companies that now demand access to the chip that monitors your use of the device and will cut off your device coverage if they don’t like what they see- either it’s not effective “enough” or you didn’t use it enough days. Forget or refuse to take it with you out of town? You may come back to an insurance denial for future coverage.
We already see doctors clinics that punish patients if they don’t take their narcotic painkillers often enough- under the assumed accusation that they must therefor be selling them or otherwise up to some criminal purpose.
So the question becomes- who will be able to demand your toilet data?
This technology could be fantastic. I like early cancer screening! I like people being able to access their own health information directly, at home! It’s easy to see how this could help people make better, more informed healthcare decisions.
If we prepare, as a society, to protect people against the intrusions that this level of monitoring makes possible.
It's not really about the toilets. It's about how our technologies are outstripping our culture and laws in terms of holding our own interiors as the last stand against intrusion.
Before I go, I wanted to let people know that not only am I still on Tumblr and posting a chapter a week of Secondhand Origin Stories as a readalong, but I'm now on BlueSky, and trying to work out how I want to use that. Come say hi!
As always, thanks for joining me, and please feel encouraged to invite anyone you think might like to join us.
Till next month,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.