Years before a major plumbing brand began selling a $599 camera that clips onto a toilet bowl, Stanford University researchers built a prototype that went much further. It analyzed urine and stool, and it figured out who was sitting down partly by photographing the skin around the anus.
That research won the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize in Public Health. Today, toilet-based health tracking is a real consumer product category, and an early privacy dispute shows how much remains unsettled about who can see one of the most intimate data streams a person produces.
