The Throne toilet camera takes pictures of your poop

Throne is an Austin-based health startup. It sells a camera. That attaches to the side of the toilet bowl. It takes pictures of your poop. Currently in beta, the system uses artificial intelligence to check your dookie as a way to determine things like gut health and hydration.

It turns out that we have an incredible amount of reading in our logs.

Throne calls its core technology “artificial gut intelligence.” That AI is “trained by doctors to help you understand what your waste is trying to tell you about your health,” according to the company. Doctors look for various signs of health found in waste, including “nuances” in urine to determine hydration levels.

The company is quick to note that the images are “anonymous.” TechCrunch reached out to the company to get a better idea of ​​what Throne is doing to address the inevitable security and privacy red flags that arise when discussing the bathroom camera.

At the behest of TechCrunch, the company on Friday posted a “privacy and security” page detailing some of those measures. At the top of that list, no doubt, are the shared questions of what, exactly, Thrones is filming and how we’re using that footage. The camera is gently trained on the bottom of the bowl.

“We only take pictures of the contents of your toilet bowl,” wrote Trone. “Any other data is inconsistent with our mission and may compromise our ability to provide accurate health information. We use image recognition technology to automatically remove any irrelevant images. This ensures that only private data is stored.”

Users can request full access to their data to see what kind of crap Throne collects. The company will also remove everything if requested. All data is encrypted by TLS 1.2 or higher on the company’s servers.

“We don’t have access to individual data,” Trone added. “Our team only analyzes anonymized, aggregated data, which means the data cannot be traced back to the original user — you!”

Few of us expect to get into the bathroom camera business. That can be said by the founders of the throne. CEO Scott Hinkle tells TechCrunch that the startup began life as a marketplace for healthcare workers, but quickly realized it had entered an already crowded field.

Shortly after raising $1.2 million in seed funding from investors, including Night Capital, Rief Ventures, and Hustle Fund, the company found itself at a crossroads.

“In six weeks we had the painful realization that the market was saturated and it wasn’t a sandbox we wanted to play in,” Hinkle said, “so we stepped in, and our investors were shockingly cool when it came to consumer hardware.”

The throne didn’t just turn. It turned out to be poop. The company focuses on both the elderly and those with chronic digestive conditions, including Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and IBS.

If that sounds like you – and you can get past the idea of ​​mounting a camera in your bathroom – the Trone system will be pre-programmed following a limited beta. The best price for the smart bathroom camera is $499, though the company is making it available for $299 if you want to get in early.