Alot of Viruses or Bacteria remain dorment for some time before unleashing attacks, though for a very short time, these viruses are still spreading from one person to another though various orifice including the one behind into the sewer, and if they monitor the sewer they can catch something like this early in the group of population and hence a preventive measure before the next pandemic
Yes, the above was just in someone’s head during pandemic era
But then, they were able to also determine stress level in a given population with a study done in China from sewer water Link to paper in Pubmed
Your shit reflects what you eat, what you feel and underlying health conditions
For now, you are anonymous among the group of people living in the same town so they cannot exactly tell you apart from other’s sewer. But what if they find a way to shitprint where they can uniquely identify you from the shit you just dumped? Maby just a way to extract DNA from your shit stuff.
Maby if you are a wistleblower or someone the government would want to keep track of, they may somehow engineer a biological weapon that does not harm but will replicate itself just enough for it to be released from behind and let them know where you are.
Again, this is a far fetched and frankly stupid. But our current surveillance reality was just as stupid a decade ago.
I can imagine data brokers trying to get into the sewers to gather health data for advertisement far in the future. So I guess the only viable alternative would be to build septic tank to fight such surveillance like we currently do with selfhosting to protect our data. Just like we dont let these corporations get the hold of our data willingly, should we let our sewers get into their hand?
Wastewater analysis is a real thing and is very useful. People were using it to track covid after the pandemic although idk how accurate it was there.
The privacy concern here is only if they are getting per-household or per-toilette data. You don’t have to worry about per-household analysis ever happening unless your sewer system is somehow privatized, in which case, lol rip.
Smart toilets exist and definitely are a massive privacy concern. But they haven’t caught on because only rich weirdos would ever want their toilet to be an iot device.
I understand that there is a public benefit to this technology/data, but there are definitely concerns (including privacy concerns) even if the data is not currently widely available at a per household, per toilet, or per individual level. For example, insurance companies may not insure people who live in specific neighborhoods and it could lead to increased levels of surveillance through other means. There is also usually limited (or no) methods of opting out leaving a person’s consent to be questioned, especially visitors. Speaking of visitors, it could also enable location tracking/history of a person.
This really is just scratching the surface here, as is this technology. As the technology progresses, this can (and likely will) evolve into more sophisticated, granular, and wide ranged levels of tracking. Granted much of this is speculative, but the same thing has happened with computers, cell phones, TVs, cars, cameras, ancestry/DNA services, and many other services. As a result, its important to think of both current and future implications when considering the benefit and abilities of these technologies/data.