Image Credits:Throne Throne is an Austin-based health startup. It sells a camera. That clips onto the side of a toilet bowl. It takes pictures of your poop. Currently in beta, the system utilizes artificial intelligence to examine your dookie as a way of determining things like gut health and hydration.
Turns out we have a surprising amount to learn from our logs.
Throne calls its underlying technology “artificial gut intelligence.” That AI is “trained by physicians to help you understand what your waste is trying to tell you about your health,” per the company. The doctors are looking for various signs of health found in waste matter, including “nuances” in urine to determine hydration levels.
The company is quick to note that the images are “anonymized.” TechCrunch reached out to the company to get a better idea of what Throne is doing to address the inevitable security and privacy red flags that arise when discussing a toilet camera. Image Credits:Throne At TechCrunch’s behest, the firm on Friday posted a “privacy and security” page outlining some of those measures. At the top of that list, no doubt, are the joint questions of what, precisely, Throne is recording and how it uses those images. The camera is mercifully trained down at the bowl.
“We only capture images of the contents of your toilet bowl,” Throne writes. “Any other data is irrelevant to our mission and could compromise our ability to provide accurate health insights. We use image recognition technology to automatically delete any non-relevant images. This ensures that only toilet-related data is retained.”
Users can request full access to their data to see what manner of crap Throne is collecting. The company will also delete everything upon request. All data is encrypted by TLS 1.2 or higher on the company’s servers.
“We do not access an individual’s data,” Throne adds. “Our team only analyzes anonymized, aggregated data, which means the data can’t be traced back to the original user — to you!”
Few of us expect to get into the toilet camera business. That much can be said about Throne’s founders. CEO Scott Hinkle tells TechCrunch that the […]
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