US regulators have accused Weight Watchers of using a diet app to illegally gather information on children as young as eight years old, including their names, email addresses and birth dates, without their parents’ consent.
A complaint, filed on Friday by the justice department on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, said that Weight Watchers and its subsidiary Kurbo – a kids’ weight management platform – violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which requires parental consent for the collection or use of any personal information of users under the age of 13 years old.
In 2018, Weight Watchers – which rebranded as WW – acquired Kurbo Health, a technology startup, and went on to launch Kurbo by WW. The release of the app was met with criticism, as it was designed to target kids and teenagers between eight and 17 years old.
Medical professionals and parents argued that it was “irresponsible” of Weight Watchers to release the app and said it could encourage children to develop “life altering eating disorders that will eventually kill some of them”.
The FTC alleged that the app’s signup process encouraged younger users to falsely claim that they were above 13 years old, despite text that indicated to children below 13 that they needed to sign up with a parent.
The registration interface indicated two options: “I am a parent. I’ll sign myself up first so I can support my child on the Kurbo program” and “I am at least 13 and using the app for myself, without parental supervision.”
The complaint said, “While theoretically intended to screen users under 14 from registering without the assistance of a parent, this non-neutral age signaled to children that they could register without involving a parent by indicating they were at least 13 years old.
“In fact, from 2014 to 2019, hundreds of users who signed up for the app claiming to be over the age of 13 later changed their birthdates on their profiles to indicate they were really under 13,” the FTC said.
Although the signup option for children over 13 years old was revised in 2020, the FTC allege that Kurbo nonetheless “failed to provide a mechanism to ensure that those who choose the parent signup option were indeed parents and not a child trying to bypass the age restriction”.
The FTC also accused Weight Watchers and Kurbo of retaining children’s personal information indefinitely and “only deleting it when requested by a parent”.
In a statement to CBS, Michael Colosi, general counsel at Kurbo, pushed back against the allegations. “At no time did Kurbo ever target children with advertising, sell data to third parties or otherwise monetize its users in any way, and no parents or children ever complained that Kurbo used their personal data in an inappropriate manner,” he said.
On Thursday, a federal judge in California approved a settlement order that requires Weight Watchers and Kurbo to pay a $1.5m penalty, delete sensitive health data and destroy any algorithms derived from the data.
“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,” said Lina Khan, the FTC chair, in a statement.
According to Colosi, the $1.5m settlement is merely a reflection of “Kurbo’s desire to focus on its business and its mission of continuing to help families and children in a safe and protected environment”.
