[PATREON PREVIEW] Bill Gates Daughter's $43M Tech Scandal

But here, what you see that happened quote unquote wrong is something from which they so brazenly benefit. It's an awfully convenient bug. Last April, Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of billionaire Bill Gates and her former Stanford roommate, Sophia Chiani, founded a startup called Fia. Phoebe Gates was only 22 years old at the time of its founding, but the company got a deluge of press and hype. It raised a total of $43.5 million from top Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and a slew of celebrity investors, including Sydney Sweeney, Khloe Kardashian, and Hailey Bieber. It had all the signs of a hot new Silicon Valley startup. Even Sheryl Sandberg was an investor. The company framed itself as an AI-powered shopping assistant. They marketed it as Google Flights but for fashion. FIA's browser extension and app compare prices across thousands of retailers to help shoppers find the best deals online. In the crowded, messy world of online shopping, people were craving an app or platform that would make their shopping experience smarter and more transparent, and hopefully save them some money in the process. FIA absolutely took off The app has been downloaded more than 1 million times in the past 12 months alone And thousands of users allow Fia to compare prices find secondhand versions of fashion items and trawl the web for discount codes. Fia was such a successful startup that Phoebe Gates and her co-founder actually both ended up on last year's 30 Under 30, which looking back now, honestly should have been a red flag. Last year, security researchers found that Fia was secretly logging users' web history, including snapshots that showed the full content of pages that they visited. The information that FIA was scraping included sensitive data like bank statements and private email accounts, all of which was transmitted back to FIA's servers. Now, FIA said at the time that it simply logged users' web page content to, quote, understand if the site was a shopping destination and to identify and support retailers as they were discovered. But after the story spread around and outlets like Fortune covered it, FIA stopped capturing full web page content and instead relied on just tracking URLs, which is much safer and more privacy focused. But now FIA is in hot water again. Ben Edelman is one of the internet's most iconic researchers when it comes to affiliate marketing. The man is a legend. He combines software engineering with law and economics to investigate some of the biggest problems on the internet He holds a PhD from the Department of at Harvard University a JD from Harvard Law School a Master of Arts in Statistics from Harvard and a Bachelor Degree in Economics from Harvard summa cum laude Ben has been involved in some of the most pivotal internet law cases and fights over the past couple decades. And last week, he published a bombshell investigation into FIA. In his report, he detailed how FIA was essentially committing fraud, taking credit for online sales that it had nothing to do with. He alleged that the company was engaged in what could be called cookie stuffing or silently adding tracking codes to retailers' websites without permission. Bloomberg quickly tested Ben's claims, and they found that when a FIA user was in the final stages of making a purchase on any website online, the browser extension would automatically open a background tab that loaded FIA's affiliate link to the retailer's site to ensure that its cookie was set. The tab opened and closed within seconds and only happened on the mobile browser, so users wouldn't even know that this secret tab was opening. Basically, FIA and Phoebe Gates have been potentially skimming millions of dollars in affiliate revenue off sales that they didn't drive. Bloomberg found that FIA was doing this on over 50 major retailers' websites, including Zara, Walmart, Nike, and more. This scandal is serious and the allegations here could be criminal So to discuss all of this I have the legend here himself Ben Edelman He going to walk through exactly what Fia has been doing how Phoebe Gates and her co likely knew about these business practices why celebrity investors like Hailey Bieber and Sidney Sweeney could be in hot water, and how what Fia and its co-founder Phoebe Gates are potentially doing could be driving up prices on common goods for all of us. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.co. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. 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