Bloomberg Reporters Had Full Access To Customer Usage Logs, Including Help Transcript Logs

from the privacy-policy dept

Mon, May 13th 2013 3:33am — Mike Masnick

This one is fairly incredible. Bloomberg LP's main business is selling ridiculously expensive terminals to Wall Street/financial folks for tracking market information. While I understood why they were able to succeed early on, I've been shocked that the internet hasn't seriously disrupted their business over the past decade or so. However, the company also has a pretty big journalism business as well (even owning Business Week, which it bought for pennies a few years ago). Now it's coming out that the journalists at Bloomberg had all sorts of access to how customers use the terminals.

Until recently, all Bloomberg employees could access information about when and how terminals were used by any customer. But after complaints by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, Bloomberg says its 2,000 or so journalists no longer have access to that information, though other staff still do. Bloomberg has more than 15,000 employees.

The banks were concerned that Bloomberg News was keeping tabs on terminal usage in order to aid its reporting. JP Morgan specifically cited coverage of the bank’s disastrous derivatives trading, known as the “London Whale,” which Bloomberg was the first to reveal.

Incredibly, the reporters also had access to "help" transcripts of any customer and could call them at will, which apparently some of them did for fun.

Several former Bloomberg employees say colleagues would look up chat transcripts of famous customers, like Alan Greenspan, for amusement on slow workdays. The transcripts were typically mundane and hardly incriminating, but who wouldn’t enjoy watching a former US Treasury secretary struggle to use a computer? And, in theory, the substance of someone’s query to customer service could reveal specific information that he’s interested in, tipping off a reporter to a story.

These are the kinds of things that small companies sometimes screw up with poor controls over information. But a massive company like Bloomberg -- especially when it deals with critical financial information -- you would think would have much tighter controls on information. I'd be curious if this violates whatever privacy policies Bloomberg has with its customers. At the very least, it should make Bloomberg customers pretty damn skeptical of continuing to use their terminals. Seems like a huge opportunity for competitors with better controls to step in.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: bloomberg terminals, controls, information, journalism, privacy, reporters
Companies: bloomberg, goldman sachs, jp morgan

16 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Ninja (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 3:37am

That's a matter of trust. Once a company that relies a lot on trust alone loses it what happens? ;)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 3:57am

Use a private company, they do the spying.
Use the internet, the government does the spying.
Who do you let spy on you, that is the question.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
That Anonymous Coward (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 4:15am

So is this the mindset that lead him want this kind of access to his citizens lives?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 4:17am

Irony
The irony here is rich. The banks are making a lot of noise about this to the New York Times but they're well aware that under the Terms of Service they agreed to allow Bloomberg staff virtually unfettered access to their usage data. Oh the humanity.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
That Anonymous Coward (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 4:38am

Re: Irony
But as corporate people they are used to using TOS agreements to screw the little people, they aren't supposed to be screwed by them.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 5:06am

Re:
And since when are ISPs not private companies?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it

out_of_the_blue, 13 May 2013 @ 5:26am

Even the supposedly savvy foolishly trust corporations.
They should remember that capitalism is dog-eat-dog and that corporations are totally amoral, will sell even its own favored children if the price is right and risks are low, or even better, it's "legalized".

Everyone should remember that there's no such thing as "privacy" on the net.

For example, ANYONE here could be snooped on quite a bit just by Mike asking his pals at Google for all the records associated with your IP address. -- IF you're NOT totally "paranoid", it's only because haven't thought on just how many ways computer-recorded information can be exploited.

Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Where Mike's "no evidence of real harm" means he wants to let secretive mega-corporations continue to grow.
01:25:59[b-626-5]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 5:36am

Re: Even the supposedly savvy foolishly trust corporations.
So, mind explaining this secrect mega corps thing?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 5:39am

You do realise that much of the spying is about catching potential infringers, right, Blue?

You were doing great till you insinuated that Mike can get our personal details at the drop of a hat. Get back on your meds, you loon!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 5:52am

The chat log thing sounds pretty routine for a customer service call center. Callers generally expect the person they are speaking with to know that they have called recently and what was spoken about. So that means transcripts or, more likely, notes recorded for each call. Of course they have access to such things it's necessary cor the job. Some employees will look up famous people just out of curiosity and a bit of voyeurism.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 7:06am

Re:
Don't forget, about 10 years ago, multiple BBERG employees were caught searching users emails for key words, ie, merger, aquisition, etc. and were found to have used inside information.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 7:09am

Re: Even the supposedly savvy foolishly trust corporations.
"...corporations are totally amoral, will sell even its own favored children if the price is right and risks are low, or even better, it's "legalized"."

And this from a boy taking their blood money!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 7:09am

Not exactly the whole point of the story, but happy to share what I know about the first bit.

"Bloomberg LP's main business is selling ridiculously expensive terminals to Wall Street/financial folks for tracking market information. While I understood why they were able to succeed early on, I've been shocked that the internet hasn't seriously disrupted their business over the past decade or so."

When I worked for IBM, I supported some very similar products made by Reuters (before and after they were bought by Thomson). If Bloomberg was anything like Reuters, it was speed, reliability and support. Similar reason that Red Hat has a viable business model even though Linux is free for anyone. It's not an exageration to say that millions or billions of dollars worth of trades depended on some of those systems, and the banks and trading firms spent a lot of money to make sure they were solid. Real time access to market data, not delayed by minutes like you get from some cheaper solutions. In some cases, we're talking multiply redundant systems with multiply redundant dedicated circuits (network connections). That kinda stuff gets tied into various high-frequency-trading systems. Fast support - in the case of some locations in NY, we could have techs and engineers onsite to a customer location within minutes if something bad enough happened, and a hour or two for even standard kind of issues.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 13 May 2013 @ 8:20am

This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It�s just the way it is...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
DH's Love Child (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 9:48am

Re:
But those logs should not be accessible to EVERY employee of the company. Especially not anyone outside of the division of the company responsible for customer service and support of the terminals.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
John Fenderson (profile), 13 May 2013 @ 10:56am

Re: Re:
The logs should not be accessible outside the company, but there is great value to having them available to a large segment of the company internally. For example, I am currently employed by a major company as a software developer. About half my workload is fixing bugs that have been reported from customers.

Being able to read the logs and notes from tech support is frequently of great use to me. There are often nuggets of information in them that didn't seem important to anyone at the moment, but turn out to be critical clues.

Often, these are in cases that on the surface do not appear related to the specific case I'm working. If I were unable to have free access to all of these records, it would greatly reduce my working efficiency -- and occasionally would prevent me from fixing a problem at all.

However, I also am bound to a strict NDA, and I am forbidden from revealing any information about cases or the identity of customers to anyone outside the company. Doing so would cost me my job and perhaps expose me to a lawsuit. This is as it should be.
[ link to this | view in thread ]