Following a lawsuit by the US competition and consumer protection authority FTC, WW International, formerly Weight Watchers and its subsidiary Kurbo, must remove illegally collected data and algorithms derived from it. The companies had launched weight-tracking apps for children under the age of 13, some of whom collected personal and health information from children without parental consent.
Along with a $1.5 million fine, the companies were ordered to remove the data they illegally collected, as well as any models and algorithms they developed based on that data. Decision Doesn’t go into further detail at this point, but the arrangement is primarily aimed at AI models that have been trained with the app’s data and thus incorporate knowledge from the data.
serious voices
For the FTC, removing algorithms is an important tool to prevent companies from continuing to profit from illegally collected data, even if they have to destroy the data. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, wants to send a signal to companies that it’s not worth training AI models with illegally collected data, as she wrote in an article last year Was. yale journal of law and technology wrote.
The criticism is mainly directed at the vague representation that needs to be removed. Furthermore, it is not clear how the FTC can investigate whether all algorithms into which the illegally collected data has flowed have in fact been destroyed.
(OD)
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