A few weeks ago, I came across a wild post on Reddit’s r/DHExchange, a subreddit for trading large datasets: “I hoarded a large database of something valuable, just not what’s [sic] you expect…150k stools images.”
The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: “I’ve got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there’s a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I’m sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can’t find who wants them.” The poster added that “the images are extremely rare,” and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.
The comments were from people who were mostly horrified: “When I was 5 the teacher taught me how to read. I now regret that happened,” one read. “What in the fuck,” another read. “How to delete someone else’s post,” a third said.
I messaged the poster and told him I was interested in obtaining the database. Thus began my journey into the Internet of Shit and, by extension, the unpleasant world of the underground sale of highly sensitive, app-collected user data for AI training.
The poop database comes from an app called PoopCheck, an app made by a company called Soft All Things that purports to use AI to analyze images of one’s stool in order to give you a “daily gut health score.”
“Our AI analyzes your poop using the Bristol Stool Scale and advanced pattern recognition. Get insights on consistency, color, shape, and what they mean for your digestive health,” the app advertises. The Bristol Stool Scale classifies stools into one of seven types ranging from “separate hard lumps, like little pebbles” to “watery with no solid pieces.”
The app also features a “community,” of 151,317 “shared stools” at the time of this writing and a “leaderboard,” where people can share images of their poop for commentary from other users and earn points for participating. I found the posts in the community a bit hard to stomach, with titles “like play dough,” “Concerned,” and “Dealing with this on and off for the past 3 weeks.” Pictures are not automatically shared to the community; when you take a photo it asks if you want to share it.
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