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Biodata Capitalism, After the Flush: Privacy, Profit, and the Vanishing Biocommons

November 6, 2025

This article examines how biodata capitalism transforms bodily waste into profitable data assets fueling prediction, surveillance, and speculation. Following the flush, Guirguis tracks three arenas where waste becomes value: wastewater surveillance that quantifies viral loads and drug use; smart toilets that monitor stool and stream biomarkers to apps; and stool banks that convert donations into inputs for diagnostics and pharmaceuticals. Though these systems promise public-health benefits, they depend on unpaid labor, weak privacy, and profit-driven ownership of health data. Guirguis shows how pipelines and business models shift care from collective “we-medicine” to individualized “me-medicine,” turning toilets, testing kits, and sewers into extraction infrastructures that rewire sanitation for speculative accumulation and normalize population profiling under neoliberal health regimes.