Reuters

I wasn’t actually surprised to learn that public officials in Toronto had agreed to install “smart toilets” in the city’s convention center so they could analyze public, um, data. As a privacy researcher, the idea fascinated me.

Only problem: It wasn’t true.

But a fake toilet company’s publicity stunt has me thinking, which is whatQuantified Toilets intended. Smart toilets are just the kind of product you expect to encounter at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing, or CHI, an annual event where researchers discuss the latest science of how people interact with technology. This is my favorite conference to attend. There are always new and cool projects that make me think.

So when Quantified Toilets debuted at CHI this week, it was an immediate hit. The company claimed to have installed sensors in the Toronto Convention Center and other civic venues that would automatically analyze “deposits” in the toilets to detect a person’s gender, drug and alcohol levels, pregnancy status, sexually-transmitted-infection status, and… smell.

There were signs in the bathrooms that read: “Behavior at these toilets is being recorded for analysis.”

The accompanying website featured a live stream (ha) of toilet data being collected in real time.