Actually, it's a logical place to collect information.
Japan is, apparently, in the midst of a toilet war in which toilet producing companies are competing for who can design the best, or perhaps the most user friendly, toilet. It's apparently quite a battle, though true to form, I wouldn't have known about it had I not been trying to do something else.
Though many of today's luxuries might have been considered totally undesirable when they first appeared, I'll take a chance at being technologically retro and claim that I gravely doubt that I'm going to either need or want most of the new inventions that Japanese toilets are advancing (though I should remind readers that when I first saw someone walking down the street listening to a Walkman I thought that it would never catch on).
The various advances in luxury toilets, however, aren't really what interests me here, only one small (and again, possible) aspect of them. As reported in a New York Times article from a bit more than a year ago:
Then in June, Toto, Japan's toilet giant, came out with WellyouII, a toilet that automatically measures the user's urine sugar levels by making a collection with a little spoon held by a retractable, mechanical arm.
Later in that same article we read a prediction of one of the people interviewed:
"You may think a toilet is just a toilet, but we would like to make a toilet a home health measuring center," Mr. Matsui, the Matsushita engineer, said in a lecture here in Nara, near Osaka. "We are going to install in a toilet devices to measure weight, fat, blood pressure, heart beat, urine sugar, albumin and blood in urine."
The results would be sent from the toilet to a doctor by an Internet-capable cellular phone built into the toilet. Through long-distance monitoring, doctors could chart a person's physical well-being.
Here, as elsewhere, the information gathered is ostensibly for the user's welfare. But who's to say that persons other than doctors won't succeed in logging into that same information. An insurance company might, for instance, attempt to verify that someone whom they insure is actually as healthy as he or she claims to be. This most certainly should be considered an issue of privacy, though I've got a guess that in a court of law a person's body can't be used to testify against him or her (where does the body end and the person begin?).
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