Skip to main content

Advertised as a weight management service for kids, teens, and families, the Kurbo by WW app and website let kids as young as 8 track their weight, food intake, activity, and more. The problem? Many parents didn’t know their kids were using it, while the app and website were collecting and keeping information about kids without their parents’ permission.

Today the Department of Justice and FTC announced that Kurbo and its parent company WW International (formerly Weight Watchers) have agreed to settle charges they collected personal information from kids under 13 without notifying parents or getting their permission — something the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) requires. That personal information included name, phone number, birth date, and persistent identifiers, including device IDs corresponding to specific accounts.

To settle the charges, the companies have agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty, delete all personal information collected from kids under 13 without parental permission, and destroy any algorithms that used this illegally collected information. In the future, they must destroy any information they collect from kids under 13 if it’s been more than a year since the kid used their app.

Read How To Protect Your Privacy on Apps or visit ftc.gov/YourPrivacy to learn more about protecting your family’s privacy online.

Topics
Online Privacy and Security
Protecting Kids Online

It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.

The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.

  • We won’t post off-topic comments, repeated identical comments, or comments that include sales pitches or promotions.
  • We won’t post comments that include vulgar messages, personal attacks by name, or offensive terms that target specific people or groups.
  • We won’t post threats, defamatory statements, or suggestions or encouragement of illegal activity.
  • We won’t post comments that include personal information, like Social Security numbers, account numbers, home addresses, and email addresses. To file a detailed report about a scam, go to ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.

Return to top