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Is Finland keeping toilets safe? Or is big brother watching you poop?Posted 02.26.2008 by Dave
In the bathroom utopia of the glorious future, pristine municipal facilities will await on every corner, their stall doors wide open to all comers and goers. This utopia will come into being only when the golden brown rule ("Doo unto others…") is held sacrosanct -- until then, as long as public toilets provide a respite from prying eyes, there will be those who use them less wholesome acts than that for which they're designed.
This is the problem confronting authorities who want to provide for their pooping populace: the more open and accessible toilets are for those who need to go, the more open and accessible they are for those with other things on their minds. Drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, arsonists, and turd terrorists thrive in the surveillance vacuum created for the benefit of the emboweled. But most measures taken to add security come at the expense of usability. Take the new public toilets in New York City: in the quest for an undefilable public toilet, they've created an unusable one. The solution to this problem, as Finland's Road Administration has shown, may lie not in prevention but in deterrence. Their problem was theft and arson in highway toilets and an inability to institute appropriate surveillance. Their solution was to encourage self-policing by trading surveillance for accountability. Pulling into a rest-stop on Finland's Highway 1, you'll find the bathroom door locked. To unlock the toilet, text "open" to such-and-such number. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of who's been pooping, so if anything unsavory (aside from last night's Mämmi) happens, the police will have the mobile number of the culprit. Assuming the company protects their users' privacy (a non-trivial assumption, I admit), and assuming the mobile numbers aren't passed to telemarketers selling portable toilet seat covers, I see no problem in this approach. If people know they will be identified, they'll be less likely to cause trouble. It's obviously not a foolproof system -- stolen mobiles will be a problem, as will friendly people who hold the door open for people waiting. But there's no such thing as a foolproof system. The goal should be to find the balance between privacy and security that maximizes the period between incidents of excretory malfeasance. 100% uptime can be guaranteed only if a) privacy is completely surrendered or b) society is fully assimilated into the bathroom utopia. Finland has made a good compromise: mostly secure, and mostly private. That's a bathroom I'm willing to poop in. Show some poop support, or make a poop retort.
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