Phia co-founder Phoebe Gates allegedly knew of cookie-stuffing feature months before Bloomberg report

Bloomberg’s new investigation alleges that Phia, a shopping-assistant startup co-founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni, knowingly used a cookie-stuffing feature to claim commissions on sales it did not actually generate. The practice, which involves dropping affiliate cookies on users’ browsers without their consent, was described in internal Slack messages as a controllable option called “enable coupon auto drop.”

“I guess we could say that the user is trying to open us and roll it back if they complain,” Kianni reportedly wrote in response to an engineer’s compliance concerns.

“That makes sense yeah I just whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing thank you,” the same engineer is said to have replied.

Bloomberg’s report says Gates discussed verifying that cookies were dropped on all sites in December, and that the company also employed a feature that automatically dropped a cookie every two hours for users who had interacted with the extension on a “top 1000 website.” After the “coupon auto drop” feature was disabled in early July, Phia’s internal revenue chart showed a decline from about $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000.

Phia has denied the allegations, stating the revenue drop was unrelated to the feature’s removal and that it will hire a head of compliance to prevent similar issues in the future.