Are smart-toilets upon us? Sadly, no.

The surveillance society appears to have gone just a step too far.

A company named Quantified Toilets announced this week it would be installing smart-toilets at the convention center in the city of Toronto, Canada.

To quote from their literature: “Using advanced sensing technologies and a state of the art centralized waste data collection system, we are able to discreetly capture data from each individual toilet. Activities at each toilet create unique signatures…” and, well it goes on.

It was also, sadly, a hoax. A sort of interactive experiment at a conference in Toronto this week about human factors in computing.