Yelp Announces Settlement With FTC Over Child Privacy Rights Violations

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
San Francisco-based online customer rating and review website Yelp has agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the sum of $450,000 for illegally collecting the personal information of youngsters under the age of 13 without proper consent.
According to VentureBeat’s Richard Byrne Reilly, Yelp violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting the names, email addresses and other identifying information from children, some of whom were nine years old or younger, without their permission or that of their parents.
The service, which was launched in 2004, was reportedly collecting the data without permission between 2009 and 2013. In a blog entry posted Tuesday, Yelp VP of Communications and Public Affairs Vince Sollitto said that the data collection was the result of “a bug in our mobile registration process.”
That bug, Sollitto explained, “allowed certain users to register with any birth date when it was supposed to disallow registrations from individuals under 13. The good news is that only about 0.02 percent of users who actually completed Yelp’s registration process during this time period provided an underage birth date, and we have good reason to believe that many of them were actually adults.”
He also said that birthdays are not even required for users to register, and that the process can be completed by anyone (including minors) without inputting that data. However, Sollitto noted that, once the company was made aware of the issue, “we fixed it immediately and closed the affected users’ accounts.”
Prior to 2009, users were only able to register through Yelp’s website, which contained a screening mechanism that blocked those under the age of 13 from signing up, explained John Ribeiro of PCWorld. However, when Yelp rolled out a registration feature in its mobile app later that year, it neglected to implement a function age-screening mechanism.
For that reason, both the Android and iOS versions of the app accepted registrations and collected data from users who entered birthdates that indicated that they were underage, according to an FTC complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. That activity continued until April 2013, Ribeiro said.
“The FTC charged Yelp with violating the COPPA Rule by failing to provide notice to parents of its information practices, and to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children,” he added. “Under the proposed settlement, Yelp has to destroy the personal information of children under 13 who registered with the service within 30 days of the entry of the order, in most cases.”
“Yelp doesn’t promote itself as a place for children, and we certainly don’t expect or encourage them to write reviews about their plumbers, dentists, or latest gastronomic discoveries,” added Sollitto. “We’re glad to have been able to cooperate with the FTC to get to a quick resolution and look forward to continuing our efforts to protect our users.”
Yelp is not the only online company to feel the FTC’s wrath over COPPA regulations this year, according to Reilly. Apple, Google and Amazon have all been hit with fines after the trade commission accused them of billing minors for unauthorized purchases in their respective app marketplaces. Apple and Google settled for a combined sum of more than $60 million, while Amazon is fighting the FTC’s ruling, he added.
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