Privacy Policy | WW Australia

We recognise the importance of protecting your privacy and the security of your information and we want you to be as comfortable as possible when using the products and services we offer.

This Privacy Policy explains how we protect the privacy of the information that we collect across our business and the choices you have concerning the use of such information, among other important issues. This Privacy Policy is compliant with Australian privacy legislation. Please read this Privacy Policy carefully as it will apply to the information we collect from you or about you, for example:

through your use of our products, offerings, features, tools or resources (“Offerings”) that we provide on our Website , and personal digital assistants or other handheld or mobile devices (collectively, our “Handheld Products”), and the software application needed to utilise the Offerings on your Handheld Products (the “Application”);

• when you join or participate in our program ;
• via the Australian and New Zealand websites operated by us or on our behalf (collectively, our “Website”);
• through purchase of our products through our Website which may be through our service providers (collectively, our “Products”);
• when you participate in any promotions, surveys or loyalty programs we run or otherwise make available to you; or through any other means.

For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, “we”, “us”, “our” and “WW” means together Fortuity Pty Ltd (ABN 55 007 148 683) (“WWA”), ww.com, LLC. (“ww.com”), WeightWatchers New Zealand Limited, WW New Zealand Unit Trust and WW International, Inc. (“WW International”).

We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post any changes to this Privacy Policy here so that you will always know what the latest version of our Privacy Policy is. Please refer back to our Privacy Policy on a regular basis to ensure you are up to date. By providing us with information, using any of our Website, our Products or Offerings you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy as updated.

Please remember that we are not responsible for the privacy of any information you reveal or post in any public forum (e.g. message board, blog, personal page, etc.) or through the “Public Profile” feature available on our Website, or for the privacy practices of websites that are operated or owned by third parties.

The following are links to the provisions of our Privacy Policy, which you should read as a whole. For immediate access to a particular topic in this Privacy Policy, click on that provision title below.

WHAT INFORMATION ABOUT YOU IS COLLECTED BY US?

We collect two types of information: personally identifiable information and non-personally identifiable information.

Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”).

PII is information from which your identity is apparent or can reasonably be ascertained and includes personal information under applicable Australian and New Zealand privacy laws. Such PII may include your name, address, email address, telephone number, birth date (primarily for eligibility purposes), billing and payment information. We may request PII (which may include some health information and other sensitive information) from you and will collect PII from you only if you voluntarily submit such information to us. Unless you give us permission to do so, we will not sell, share, license, trade or rent your PII other than as specified in this Privacy Policy.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information.

From time to time, we also may collect information that by itself cannot be used to identify or contact you, such as demographic information (like age, profession, gender or weight) ("Non-PII"). Non-PII may also include user IP addresses, browser types, domain names, and other anonymous statistical data involving the use of our Website. Non-PII is used to help us understand who uses our Website and to improve and market our Website and Offerings l.

Information from Other Sources.

We may also supplement the information we collect with information from other sources to assist us in evaluating and improving our product and service offerings, to determine your preferences so that we can tailor our Products and Offerings to your needs, and/or to study nutritional, weight loss, behavioural and fitness questions and trends in general.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN CONSEQUENCES IF YOU DO NOT PROVIDE PII?

You do not have to provide us with any PII, however, if you choose to withhold requested information, you may not be able to utilise our full offering, access special promotions or we may not be able to provide you with personalised support that is dependent upon the collection of such information.

WHERE AND WHEN IS YOUR INFORMATION COLLECTED BY US?

We may collect information (including PII) from you in a variety of different ways, both in an offline context and online, through our Offerings or other means. This collection may occur when you sign up to newsletters, purchase Products or Offerings, sign-up for memberships, become a community user on our Website, or attend Weekly Coach led Workshops for instance. Specifically, we may collect your information in the ways explained in more detail below:

Becoming a Member or Community User.

In order to access our Offerings,, such as our weight loss tools, food database or community areas, you must first complete certain steps. During these steps, you may be required to provide us with information (including PII) such as name, postcode and email address, and, if you purchase our Products or subscribe to one of our Offerings, credit card and payment information. This information is used to help us deliver our Products and Offerings to you, understand who uses our Website, Products and Offerings, to improve our offerings, for membership and billing purposes and/or to contact you.

WW Workshops.

We collect information, some of which may be PII, that you voluntarily provide to us when you choose to attend a Weekly Coach led Workshop. We collect this information in order to make our program available to you and to personalise your experience.

Cookies and Action Tags on our Website.

We also collect Non-PII on our Website passively using “cookies” and “action tags”.

“Cookies” are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device in order to identify (i) your web browser, (ii) the activities of your computer on our Website and (iii) your activity in connection with our advertisements and other marketing and promotional efforts. Cookies may be used to:

• personalise your experience on our Website (e.g., to dynamically generate content on webpages specifically designed for you),
• assist you in using our Offerings (e.g., to save you time by not having to re-enter your name upon each visit to our Website), and
• allow us to statistically monitor how you are using our Website for purposes of improving our online offerings

We also may use cookies to conduct marketing and promotional efforts, tailor certain advertisements to your browser that we think may be of interest to you, or to determine the popularity of certain content. We may link the information stored in cookies to PII you provide us and to personalise your Website experience we may store PII you provide us in an encrypted form in temporary or “session” cookies, which are erased when you close your browser.

In addition to cookies that we place on your computer, cookies may also be placed on your computer by third parties that we use to display or serve advertisements or to collect Non-PII in order to provide advertising-related services. For example, in the course of serving advertisements, our third-party ad servers may place or recognise a unique “cookie” on your browser. Neither these third parties nor their cookies collect PII on our Website, and we do not share PII with them without your permission or unless outlined under this Privacy Policy.

You do not have to accept cookies to use our Website, however, you may not be able to use certain products, offerings, features, or resources of our Website (including our Offerings) if you do not accept cookies. Although most browsers are initially set to accept cookies, you may reset your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie or to reject cookies generally. Most browsers offer instructions on how to do so in the "Help" section of the toolbar.

"Action tags," also known as web beacons or GIF tags, are a web technology used to help track anonymous website usage information, such as how many times a specific page has been viewed. Action tags are invisible to you, and any portion of our Website, including advertisements, or email sent on our behalf, may contain action tags. Unlike cookies, action tags are not placed on your computer.

We may select and use different third parties from time to time to track website usage through action tags on our Website and on our advertisements on other websites. For example, these third parties may track anonymous website usage by setting a cookie (or reading a cookie previously placed by them) on users' computers to track the activities of users who view a web page that contains action tags. These third parties may use information about your visits to this Website and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you. Periodically, upon our request, these third parties may report the anonymous data that they collect on our behalf back to us for our internal use and analysis and our treatment of this anonymous data is governed by the terms of this Privacy Policy.

By using cookies and action tags together, we are able to gain valuable information to improve our Website and our Offerings and measure the effectiveness of our advertising and marketing campaigns. We do not disclose any of your PII to our advertising partners through the use of cookies or action tags.

Finally, please note that advertisers and other third parties may also use their own cookies or action tags when you click on their advertisement or link to their website or service, on or from our Website. This Privacy Policy does not govern the use by such third-party websites or providers of third-party advertising.

Social Media Features and Widgets on our Website.

Our Website includes social media features, buttons and widgets provided by third party social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (collectively, the “Features”). A Feature may collect your IP address and which page you are visiting on our Website, and may set a cookie to enable the Feature to function properly. This cookie may allow the social media platform to link the foregoing data with your user profile. The Features are either hosted by the third party platform or directly on our Website. Your interactions with these Features are governed by the privacy policy of the relevant platform.

Facebook Connect or other

OpenID provider.

You can log in to our Website and Offeringsusing social media sign-in services such as Facebook Connect or an Open ID provider. These services will authenticate your identity. If you use one of these services or otherwise connect a social media account with your profile on our Website, we may allow you to share elements of your WW profile information e.g.: your WW username, image, and/or interactions with us on the social media platform or with other users of our Website, pursuant to any terms of service that may apply to that social media platform. If you do not want your personal information shared in this way, please do not participate in social sharing that we may make available.

Linking your account with third party applications and devices.

Our Website offers you the option to connect your WW account with third party applications or devices (each a “Tracker”) such as activity trackers that measure your activity level (e.g. the number of steps and distance walked, calories burned and other personal metrics). If you connect your WW account with an account you have with a provider of a Tracker, the third party provider will receive the information from us that you have a WW account. At the same time, data collected by your third party Tracker (for example, personal activity data collected via an activity tracker device or other collected data) will be transferred to us and may be incorporated into your WW account in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. You have the option to disconnect the Trackers from your WW account at any time via our website. Please refer to the privacy policy of your Tracker provider for further details, which may include information on what specific data is collected by your third party Tracker and account.

Referral Programs and our Website.

Through third party referral program operators and others, we offer referral programs whereby referral websites can earn commissions through the referral of members or other purchasers to our Website. To track the earning of such commissions, and to determine the effectiveness of the referral programs, the users who become members to our Offerings or purchasers through such referral websites are tracked using technologies that do not include PII (such as cookies and/or action tags). Our program operators and the referral websites themselves can only access non-PII such as data relating to the number of impressions served, the number of transactions completed, and their resulting earnings. They cannot access our customers' personal data.

If you choose to apply to be a referral website, we use the data you provide strictly for conducting business with you. We have entered into certain agreements with third party program operators for the purpose of administering our referral programs. Should you become a referral website of ours through one of our third party program operators, any information you provide to them is subject to their privacy policies.

Offerings and Handheld Products.

We collect information, some of which may be PII, that you voluntarily provide to us when you choose to use some of our Offerings (available either for free or on a membership basis) such as the "My Favourites" feature and the "Tracker" tool and the Community Areas. We also collect information that you provide voluntarily through responses to special Offerings such as surveys, questionnaires, self-assessment quizzes, contests and the like. Some of these Offerings may ask you for health related information. We collect this information in order to personalise your online experience.

Information is also collected when you use our Handheld Products, including our Application. During the installation of the Application and subsequent synchronizations, we collect Non-PII concerning your device (such as the specific type of operating system and hardware you have, and the amount of free and total memory) and the Application’s files on your device. Our Handheld Products also collect information about your usage of the Application (such as the dates you last synced with the Internet or the dates you last used certain features). When you sync your device with the Website, we store some of this information.

Public Forums and the Public Profile Feature on the Website.

We feature public forums such as those contained in the Community Areas where you and other users of our Website can communicate with one another. In addition, we offer both the "Public Profile" and “Account Settings” features of our Website to permit you to share information about yourself (including, if you elect, PII) with others. THIS PRIVACY POLICY DOES NOT PROTECT YOU WHEN YOU USE OUR PUBLIC FORUMS OR PROVIDE INFORMATION (INCLUDING PII) ABOUT YOURSELF THROUGH THE PUBLIC PROFILE FEATURE OR THROUGH ANY COMMUNITY AREA AVAILABLE ON OUR WEBSITE. You should be aware that any information shared in a public forum such as a message board, blog, personal page, posting, group, bulletin board or recipe swap or through our Public Profile feature is public information and may be seen or collected by third parties (such as search engines) that do not adhere to our Privacy Policy, although the availability of personal pages or groups identified as “private” may be limited to certain permitted users. However, even information marked “private” may be viewed by our staff. You should think carefully before disclosing any information in any public forum, or through the Public Profile feature, on our Website. For example, you should not select a username that includes personal information.

Log Files of our Website.

We also collect Non-PII through our Internet log files, which record data such as user IP addresses, browser types, domain names, and other anonymous statistical data involving the use of our Website. This information may be used to analyse trends, to administer the Website, to monitor our Website's use, and to gather general demographic information. We may link this information to PII for these and other purposes such as personalising your experience on our Website and evaluating our Offerings in general.

Email or Refer a Friend.

Through our referral tools for informing a friend about our Website, or one of our Products or Offerings, we will allow you to send your friend a one-time email containing the information you request to be sent. If you elect to use these referral tools, we will collect from you certain PII about you which you have provided, but your friend’s data such as your friend's name and email address will only be used for the purposes of sending the message.

DO WE COLLECT INFORMATION FROM CHILDREN?

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children. Our offerings are not designed for or directed to children, and are only for use by individuals who are 18 years and older. On our Website, we do not collect PII from any person we actually know is under the age of 18. In the online space particularly, parents or guardians are urged to participate in their children's exploration of the Internet and to teach their children about protecting their personal information while online.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT AND WHERE DO WE HOLD IT?

In general, we use the PII and Non-PII collected to provide you with the relevant Products and Offerings (which on digital platforms may include the display of personalised content and advertising), to fulfil administrative functions associated with these services, for example billing and account management, to enter into contracts with you, to personalise your experience and for member relationship purposes.

From time to time we will also use PII for the purpose of marketing to you, including, through electronic channels. This will include letting you know about new products and services we, or any of our specially-selected partners offer, or promotions and other opportunities in which you may be interested. You can contact us at any time if you wish to change your preferences for marketing purposes. (See Contacting Us below for more information). We may also use the information collected to contact you about important service announcements and updates regarding our Website, Products or Offerings, including information about your billing account status. You will not be able to “opt-out” of these service announcements and updates as they contain important information relevant to your use of our Website, Products and Offerings and are not promotional in nature. (If you do not wish to receive these service announcements, you may cancel your account with us and inform us that you no longer wish to receive any communication from us, including service announcements by contacting our Privacy Coordinator at the address set out below). We may also use your PII for other related business purposes, such as to cross-reference it with data collected and stored by our commercial partners on their databases, to see if we, together with our partners, can better tailor and improve our products and services. We may also seek to contact you on social media using the PII we have on record, for instance to invite you to follow us on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

We may also use the information gathered on our Website and through our Products and Offerings to perform statistical analysis of user behaviour, to analyse and evaluate issues relating to nutrition, weight loss, behaviour and fitness, or to evaluate and improve our Products and Offerings. We may link some of this information to PII for internal purposes only or to assist you in your personal weight loss efforts.

When you provide us with your PII, this information may be collected, stored and processed on secure servers located in Australia or New Zealand or outside of Australia and New Zealand.

WHEN DO WE DISCLOSE INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES?

In line with modern business practices common to many organisations, we may disclose your PII to the organisations described below. Where your PII is disclosed we will seek to ensure the information is held, used or disclosed consistently with applicable privacy laws and codes by those parties.

Affiliates.

We may disclose information (including PII) about you to our Affiliates within the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere. For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, "Affiliates" means any person or entity which directly or indirectly controls, is controlled by or is under common control with WW International, whether by ownership or otherwise. Any information relating to you that we provide to our Affiliates will be treated by those Affiliates in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. We may share your information (including PII) with franchisees of WW International, but only where we indicate to you at time of information collection that such information may be provided to a franchisee, or if we otherwise obtain your consent.

Laws and Legal Rights.

We may also disclose your information (including PII) if we believe in good faith that we are required to do so in order to comply with an applicable statute, regulation, rule or law, a subpoena, a search warrant, a court or regulatory order, or other valid legal process. We may disclose PII in special circumstances when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our terms of Membership, Website Terms & Conditions or our Membership Agreement, or to protect the safety and/or security of our customers, users, our Website or the general public.

Third Parties Generally.

We may provide to third parties information about you that does not allow you to be identified or contacted, including where such information is combined with similar information of other users of our Website, Products or Offerings. For example, we might inform third parties regarding the number of unique users who visit our Website, the demographic breakdown of the community users of our Website, or the activities that visitors to our Website engage in while on our Website. The third parties to which we may provide this information may include potential or actual advertisers, providers of advertising services (including website tracking services), commercial partners, sponsors, licensees, researchers and other similar parties

Outside Contractors.

We may provide to independent contractors, vendors, and suppliers (collectively, “Outside Contractors”) information about you to provide specific services and products related to our Website, Products and Offerings, or to help us provide, improve and market our goods and services. These Outside Contractors may sometimes have limited access to your information, including PII, in the course of providing products or services to us. Access to your PII by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary in order for the Outside Contractors to perform their limited function for us. We also require that these Outside Contractors (i) protect the privacy of your PII consistent with this Privacy Policy, and (ii) not use or disclose your PII for any purpose other than providing us with products or services for which we contracted.

Third Party Sellers.

In addition, through our Website, you may be given the opportunity to purchase (or to obtain more information regarding) certain content, products or services which are sold through a person or company other than us or our Affiliates (collectively, "Third Party Sellers"). We will attempt to make it clear to you when you are dealing with a Third Party Seller by opening a new browser or otherwise notifying you that you are leaving our Website. For example, if you see a phrase such as "powered by" or "brought to you by" followed by the name of a person or company other than WW, then you are likely on, or about to enter, a website hosted or operated by a person or company other than us. Third Party Sellers may request that you submit certain information to them in order to purchase their products or services or to obtain additional information from them. You do not need to submit this information or purchase any products or services from Third Party Sellers to access our Website. By submitting the requested information, you affirmatively consent to have that information collected by the Third Party Seller. This information is used by the Third Party Seller and may be subject to a different privacy policy. We do not otherwise share or disclose your PII to Third Party Sellers other than as detailed under this Privacy Policy.

Sale of Business.

We reserve the right to transfer information (including your PII) to a third party in the event of a sale, merger or other transfer of all or substantially all of the assets of any of us or our Affiliates provided that the third party agrees to adhere to the terms of this Privacy Policy. We will notify users of any such transfer through notice on our Website and through email.

DOES THIS PRIVACY POLICY APPLY WHEN YOU LINK TO OTHER WEBSITES?

Our Website contains links to other websites not owned or operated by us (for example, if you "click" on a banner advertisement, you will likely be taken off our Website), including links to websites operated by franchisees of WW International. We will attempt to make it obvious to you when you leave our Website and enter these websites by opening a new browser or otherwise notifying you that you are leaving our Website. However, please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such websites. We encourage you to be aware when our Website links to other websites and to read the privacy policies or statements of each and every website. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by our Website or through our Offerings, Products and Offerings.

IS THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT SECURE?

We want your information (including PII) to remain as secure as reasonably possible. We strive to provide secure transmission of your information from your computer to our servers through industry-standard techniques. To help ensure the integrity and privacy of the PII you provide to us via the Internet at the time you elect to become a community user or subscribe to our Offerings, we use Secured Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology in transmitting such PII over the Internet to our servers.. Regarding all information, we take steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to protect the information from misuse, interference and loss and from any unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

The servers on which we store PII are located in controlled, secure environments, protected from unauthorised access, use, or alteration. Only employees who need access to your information to perform a specific task or function are granted access to such information. In addition, all WW employees must abide by this Privacy Policy and are kept up-to-date on security practices. Any employee who violates this Privacy Policy is subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

With respect to transmission by the Internet, notwithstanding the above commitments to protect your information (including PII) from loss, misuse or alteration by third parties, you should be aware that there is always some risk involved in transmitting information over the Internet. There is also some risk that others could find a way to thwart our security systems. As a result, while we strive to protect your information, we cannot absolutely ensure or warrant the security and privacy of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

WHAT CHOICES DO YOU HAVE REGARDING THE COLLECTION, DISCLOSURE AND DISTRIBUTION OF YOUR INFORMATION?

Except as otherwise described in this Privacy Policy, we will only use PII for the purposes described above or as otherwise disclosed at the time we request such information from you. You must "opt-in" and give us permission to use your PII for any other purpose. If you no longer wish to receive marketing communications from us via postal mail, you may notify us by calling us at 1800 958 288 (AU) or 0800 009 009 (NZ) or by contacting our Privacy Coordinator at the address set out below. You may change your preference and "opt-out" of receiving online/electronic marketing communications by changing that option in the Account Settings feature of our Website, following the directions provided in association with the communication, or by contacting our Privacy Coordinator at the address set out below.

Generally, users of our Website are notified when PII is being collected by third parties on our Website. We do this so you can make an informed choice as to whether you should disclose information to a third party.

CAN YOU ACCESS, UPDATE OR CORRECT YOUR INFORMATION?

You can always contact us in order to (1) access your PII, (2) update or correct your PII, (3) change your preferences with respect to communications and other information you receive from us, or (4) delete the PII maintained about you on our systems, by accessing Account Settings or contacting our Privacy Coordinator at the address set out below. Such updates, corrections, changes and deletions will not have an effect on other information that we maintain, or information that we have provided to third parties in accordance with this Privacy Policy prior to such update, correction, change or deletion. However, if you so request, we will take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to notify any other entity with whom we have shared your PII of any such correction that has taken place, unless it is impracticable or unlawful to do so.

You should be aware that it is not technologically possible to remove each and every record of the information you have provided to us from our systems. The need to back-up our systems to protect information from inadvertent loss means that a copy of your PII may exist in a non-erasable form that will be difficult or impossible for us to locate. We promise that promptly after receiving your request, all PII stored in databases we actively use and other readily searchable media will be updated, corrected, changed or deleted, as appropriate, as soon as reasonably practicable.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE COLLECTED INFORMATION AFTER TERMINATION OF MY MEMBERSHIP?

Upon termination or cancellation of your paid membership, you will remain a community user of our Website unless you specifically request otherwise. We will continue to store certain PII in particular to enable us to draw on these data to provide you with ongoing access to your community user account and in the event you should re-subscribe to our Website. In the event you have any objection to this, you should submit your objection to us via email to privacy.anz@ww.com. In such case, we will delete or make anonymous your Personally Identifiable Information.

We retain all data in an ongoing sense for various reasons as allowed by law, but mainly to ensure that we can continue to provide our services to you as requested/required, and to ensure that we respect your opt-out wishes into the future. If you wish to remove your personal information from our database entirely even though this may impact our ability to provide services and/or manage your opt-out wishes, in this case please contact us using the below means.

DO WE DISCLOSE PII TO OVERSEAS RECIPIENTS?

We may disclose information (including PII) about you to our Affiliates within Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom or elsewhere overseas, and potentially to other overseas entities.

At any time that your PII is transferred to overseas recipients, we shall take such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that the overseas recipient does not breach the applicable sections of the Australian Privacy Principles in relation to the information. If you are concerned or have any issues regarding overseas disclosure, please contact us.

WHOM DO YOU CONTACT IF YOU HAVE ANY PRIVACY QUESTIONS OR WISH TO MAKE A COMPLAINT?

If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy or feel that we are not abiding by the terms of our posted Privacy Policy, or otherwise if you wish to make a complaint, please contact us in either of the following ways, leaving us your reply contact details:

Email us at:

privacy.anz@ww.com

Attn: Privacy Co-ordinator

Any complaints you make with us will be dealt with as soon as is practicable during business hours. You will generally be contacted regarding your correspondence through the contact details provided.

BY USING OUR WEBSITE, OFFERINGS,OR PRODUCTS, OR OTHERWISE PROVIDE INFORMATION TO US AS SET FORTH IN THIS PRIVACY POLICY, YOU SIGNIFY YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY, YOU SHOULD NOT USE OUR WEBSITE, OFFERINGSOR PRODUCTS. YOUR CONTINUED USE OF OUR WEBSITE, OFFERINGSOR PRODUCTS FOLLOWING THE POSTING OF CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY WILL MEAN THAT YOU ACCEPT THOSE CHANGES.

(Last modified October 2024)