The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have reached a settlement agreement with Weight Watchers and subsidiary Kurbo over claims that surfaced regarding a children’s weight loss app.
The app, Kurbo by WW, was a health and wellness app marketed by Kurbo Inc. and WW International Inc., formerly known as Weight Watchers. The app was created and marketed to children as young as eight years old.
The DOJ and FTC allege that the app illegally collected personal data including names, birthdates, and other sensitive health information from children without the consent of their parents. In doing so, WW and Kurbo violated the FTC's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Under this law, websites, apps, and other online services which are marketed and directed to children can only collect personal information from children under the age of 13 after they notify and obtain consent from parents first.
According to the complaint against WW and Kurbo, children under 13 shared their personal and sensitive health information without parental consent being acquired first. The lawsuit explains that when children under the age of 13 went on to the weight loss app to sign up, the sign-up process indirectly encouraged children to lie about whether or not their parents gave consent.
When prompted with text that indicated parental consent was needed, children falsely gave parental consent. The FTC details that between 2014 and 2019, hundreds of users who signed up with the app and initially claimed that they were over the age of 13 or claimed that they were the parent giving consent, later went back into their profile and changed their birthday indicating that they were actually under the age 13. The FTC's complaint alleges that even after changing their birthday to reflect that they were younger than 13, the users continued to have access to the app.
In 2020, the app changed the sign-up option for children under the age of 13 to avoid false parental consent. However, there were still issues and children under the age of 13 were still able to continue with the signup process and bypass parental consent. The FTC details that the app lacked a mechanism that ensured it was actually the parents who were signing up when they clicked on the parent option during the sign-up process instead of children younger than 13.
The lawsuit details that because the app kept the personal information of users under the age of 13, they were in violation of COPPA rules. The sensitive information could only be deleted after a request was made by a parent. Seeing that some users were able to proceed with signing up without the consent of parents, many parents did not know that this sensitive information was out there to be deleted in the first place.
In announcing the settlement details, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan shared, “Weight Watchers and Kurbo marketed weight management services for use by children as young as eight, and then illegally harvested their personal and sensitive health information. Our order against these companies requires them to delete their ill-gotten data, destroy any algorithms derived from it, and pay a penalty for their lawbreaking.”
The head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division also shared, “Parents have a right to know and consent before companies collect their children’s personal information.”
As part of the settlement, both WW International and Kurbo have agreed not to retain data collected from children under 13. Additionally, the company must destroy any personal information previously collected from children under 13. Any algorithms that were used to collect this data must also be destroyed. Finally, WW International and Kurbo will be required to pay a $1.5 million penalty.
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