Bloomberg Reporters Caught Spying On Terminal Users

theodp writes "Big Bloomberg is watching you. CNN reports that was the unsettling realization Goldman Sachs execs came to a few weeks ago when a Bloomberg reporter inadvertently revealed that reporters from the news and financial data provider had surveillance capabilities over users of Bloomberg terminals. 'Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists,' acknowledged a Bloomberg spokesman. 'In light of [Goldman's] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients.' Business Insider is now reporting on allegations that Bloomberg reporters used terminals to spy on JPMorgan during the 'London Whale' disaster; Bloomberg bragged about its leadership on this story."

Is there irony here?

[slimdave]

Banks are presumably outraged at the lack of Chinese walls between Bloomberg's technology provision and their journalism.

Are they equally concerned about failures of the Chinese wall between, say, the corporate advisory arm of a bank and the investment division?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weekinreview/13segal.html [nytimes.com]

One suspects not.

As a former Bloomberg employee, and terminal user

[tpjunkie]

This is not really news. The terminal has an instant messenger application built into it. If you have a buddy list with the users in question in it, you can see without doing ANYTHING whether or not that user is signed into their terminal. Furthermore, even if you are not using the instant messenger, you can always do the equivalent of a "whois" search for a user and it will tell you their status. As far as determining the functions a user is using, that is due to the analytics department whose function it is to assist users with obtaining information and helping them use various functions of the terminal. Not sure why the news division had access.