Phoebe Gates’ Shopping Start-Up Phia Addresses Sales Controversy
Phoebe Gates‘ company Phia is speaking out.
The AI shopping start-up co-founded by Bill Gates and Melinda Gates‘ daughter and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni said that it had fixed a bug in its code that reportedly allowed it to claim commissions for online sales that it had no hand in.
“Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,” a Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement adding that the company maintains compliance and is regularly audited. “Our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”
The error was first uncovered in a report by Bloomberg, which said that a review of Phia’s code by an independent researcher Ben Edelman, Capital One Shopping and the outlet itself across 50 websites proved the existence of the unearned commissions.
According to the report, the affiliate marketing company’s browser extension—which aims to help online shoppers find products at the lowest available price—would insert its own affiliate code while users would check out at third party retailers, allowing Phia to claim commissions on sales it didn’t drive.
