The settlement was reached to resolve allegations that the weight loss company and its subsidiary Kurbo violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally collecting kids' health data.
filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Kurbo by WW users sign up for the service either on its app or website by indicating that they are a parent signing up for their child or a child over the age of 13 signing up for themselves.
The FTC argues that the app "did not provide any form of notice to parents that defendants were collecting personal information from children, or seek to obtain parents’ consent for that collection" until late 2019. As a result, the agency alleges that the Kurbo by WW signup process encouraged younger users to falsely claim they were over the age of 13, despite text on the app notifying them that they must sign up through a parent. The complaint adds that hundreds of users who signed up for the app between 2014 and 2019 claimed to be over the age of 13 but later changed their birth dates on their profiles to indicate they were under 13.
In addition, the FTC claims that parents who signed their children up were only given a notice about information collection by clicking on a hyperlink buried in a string of other links. It also claims that WW International and Kurbo violated COPPA's data retention provisions by retaining children's personal information indefinitely and only deleting it when requested by a parent.
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