(gets up from toilet, computerized toilet voice speaks)
“Your analprint has changed in the last 24 hours. . . what were you doing last night anyway?”
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Researchers are already getting drug use, disease, and other useful statistics by testing and monitoring community sewage systems, already a controversial act raising concern from those who don’t want their community profiled as a drug-using community.
The good news is that there is absolutely no way this data would not be considered HIPAA-Act protected. If it can uniquely identify a person and anything about them that could be considered medical information, including the act of excretion itself I would hope, then before a single unit can be sold it will have to pass inspections and certifications from multiple government agencies, go through an approval process, have a roubust and well-documented customer and government notification plant in case of a data breech, and so on. As I found out when working with a medical device manufacturer, once approved you are not allowed to change any hardware or software without a full re-certification.
In short, these aren’t just going to show up in your employer’s restroom so they can figure out if you’re hurting the insurance rates or doing drugs, but might end up in hospitals, doctor’s offices, and clinics as a quicker way of doing sample analysis. Having one in your house would be like having any other major medical device – the same HIPAA and other medical device rules apply, even the security ones, so either you’ll end up doing 2-factor authentication every time you need to pee, or it won’t be calling back home to snitch every time time you flush.
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Now the new James Bond thriller “The Spy Who Probed Me”
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My understanding is that there are a lot of Internet of Medical Things devices, and digital therapeutics software tools, that are not nearly that heavily regulated, and it depends heavily on how they’re marketed and how the data is presented.
For one thing, the FDA has been pretty consistent that telling people their level of risk for different medical conditions, without the involvement of a doctor, is almost always forbidden, no matter how well- or poorly- supported the test is. The FDA tends to assume people are complete idiots incapable of interpreting any information (which, I can see why, but still), and that therefore no one should be allowed to have it without paying vast sums of money to get the test approved, then further vast sums to get the test conducted and interpreted for each patient.
My take is that these devices will come to market, and will be used wherever and whenever anyone wants, but you, the user, will not be allowed access to the raw data, nor to actually-useful-quantified-estimates of your disease risk or current medical health state. Instead, you’ll get vague not-technically-medical-by-some-definition “scores” on different scales (but only if you install a matching smartphone app to track you further), and your data will be “anonymized” and sold to others but also used to market all kinds of crap directly to you. Also also, because companies will fall over themselves to make the data as non-medical as possible, it will be relatively easy for law enforcement and other organizations to access it.
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Oh great, now you’re going to tell me there’s going to be friction when it comes to changing providers when it comes to capitalism invading the self. All in folate…I mean, folly.
Robust notification plan. [IIRC]
We’re gonna need more non-reversing valves.
And IDA Pro, maybe unicorn.
Ghidra seems a little much…that’s like having to do plunger jousting in there.
2 Texas Rangers 1 ceramic film crit. Maybe a PlungePublica comedy release.
Talk about use after free.
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A leaking toilet is never a good thing. And now it comes with added complication of whether you need to call the plumber, or IT…
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