FIA被曝cookie stuffing争议：Phoebe

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. When a startup called FIA launched last year, billing itself as an online shopping assistant, it got a lot of attention right away.

They had this whole list of their investors that looked like a sort of festival lineup.

That's Bloomberg Technology editor Olivia Solon.

They raised money from a bunch of celebrities and VCs. So, um, notable capital, Kleiner Perkins, Kosla Ventures, but also Sydney Sweeney, Khloe Kardashian, and Haley Bieber.

The founders were buzzy, too.

One of its founders is Phoebe Gates, who's the daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. She went to Stanford, as did Sophia Keani, who's the co-founder. The co-founders are sort of influencers, and they also kind of do a podcast. Welcome to the Burnouts, the podcast where we juggle launching a startup and surviving our 20s in New York City. FIA offers an app and a browser extension that promise to help online shoppers find deals on their favorite products.

When shoppers use FIA to make a purchase, retailers give the company a cut of the sale. The startup has raised $43.5 million, and according to estimates from app figures, it's been downloaded over a million times in the past year. But last month, Olivia reported that FIA's success wasn't all that it seemed. She found that it was taking credit for purchases it didn't facilitate, using a tactic called cookie stuffing.

You're only supposed to get the commission if the shopper takes they make an intentional click on on something you've provided and that you had an influence over the sale in some meaningful way. When Olivia brought her reporting to FIA, the company said that a recent update to their codebase had caused the issue, that they'd been made aware of the problem within the past 24 hours, and that they'd already resolved it.

But Olivia kept asking questions. And from her reporting, it appears there's more to the story. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the cookie stuffing controversy at FIA and what the latest Bloomberg reporting suggests about how much its co-founders knew and when they may have known it. For all the excitement around FIA, the product it's offering isn't entirely new. It's just the latest player in a vast industry known as affiliate marketing.

At its most basic, this is where retailers give a small commission to publishers or other people who refer shoppers to their websites. So that could be an influencer. It could be like a reviews website. I think a good example would be something like Wire Cutter, which you know does reviews of products and then recommends those products to its readers. And when you click on a link from a Wire Cutter review, a special little piece of code will be in the link.

And that will mean that if you then end up buying the product on Amazon or Walmart or wherever the product sold, Amazon or Walmart will pay Wire Cutter a small commission and it's usually, you know, a couple of percent through to like 15% depending on the type of product.

Okay. Tell me a little more about how this works, how a company like FIA makes money.

The key thing about affiliate marketing is in order to get the commission, the shopper has to have taken an intentional action with your content. So like you click on the link from Wire Cutter. You read the review on Wire Cutter, so you went to go and buy the thing. And so Fear is doing the same thing. It has its own little app that has loads of fashion items and stuff and and so you can click on a link from there and and you end up being referred to the retailer's website.

It also has this thing called a browser extension, which is a little program you add to your browser. Uh, and so as you're shopping around the internet, when you put something in your shopping cart, a little fear popup appears and offers you coupon codes and says, "Do you want to use this discount code?" And if you click on one of those discount codes, fear is entitled to a commission. Any brand with a website, it's a part of their marketing strategy.

And so fear was part of a bunch of retailers like Gap, Nordstrom, I think Walmart, a bunch of their programs to receive commissions if they help drive a sale.

So Olivia, what did you find when you started looking into FIA's practices a little more closely? Because fear has this browser extension, it's quite easy to observe how it operates and you can see um what's going on with the links as you click them to see who's affiliate code is appearing in those links. And that's responsible ultimately for determining the attribution for the sale and the commission. And when you look at the source code which is public and your colleagues analyze that source code, you can see the different features and how they are supposed to behave.

FIA was registering genuine clicks that users made using its online shopping tool.

But what FIA was also doing was registering a click even when nobody had clicked on anything. So neither clicking on a link from the app or one of the coupon codes on the pop-up. It was just registering that someone had clicked which then injects its own little cookie and then what that does is allows it to take credit for the sale and then therefore the commission. It was mainly happening on a mobile browser. You just click onto a a retailer's website and it in the background it would just secretly open another tab.

But in mobile you don't see the other tab behind it. And that tab was the thing that was registering the click

for fear.

For fear. Exactly. Even if you'd come to the website from Wire Cutter or any other referer, we ran tests across 50 or more websites and it was fairly consistently happening.

Another analysis by a competitor of FIAS, Capital One Shopping, came to similar conclusions.

They were able to see that there was something unusual happening with the fear cookie dropping.

You read about a type of cookie dropping called cookie stuffing. Can you explain what that term means and how common the practice is?

So, cookies are used in the affiliate marketing process to determine which referer was the last click before a purchase was made. And so, cookie stuffing is putting a cookie there when there hasn't been an intentional action from the shopper to click on a link intentionally or to click on a coupon. Sometimes it's done through weird pop-ups like ads and they all drop a cookie. Other times there's no interaction whatsoever.

It's just sort of stealthily happening. And what does it mean about FIA's business? It's claiming that it's driving some of the shopping that it hasn't been. It's claiming revenue from these retailers.

Well, when we were first looking at it, we couldn't determine exactly what the contribution was, but what we could see was that it was reliably happening on mobile on almost every website. I think on every website we tested um these cookies were being dropped. So that meant that you know retailers who would have made the sale anyway. So if you just had an organic sale people just visiting your website and buying stuff they didn't come from any referral those retailers would have to be paying fear for that when they shouldn't need they didn't have to.

Similarly, all the other referers, the wire cutters, the social media influencers who were sending people to those websites were having their own kind of codes replaced by fears. So, it was a kind of loss to those people as well.

Just to be clear, Olivia, what regulations exist here? Have other players been accused of this in the past? I think probably the most famous example was a company called Honey that um got bought by PayPal for $4 billion and it was another browser extension supposedly offering discounts at the checkout uh and it was found to be doing cookie stuffing. So now there's this huge ongoing litigation against Honey uh which PayPal now owns um and PayPal is denying the allegations.

So the