Bloomberg caught peeking at Goldman Sachs’ data

The company will restrict access its journalists have to customer information.

Bloomberg is hastily changing its data-access policies after a journalist working for its news service accidentally revealed that they had access to potentially sensitive information, according to a report in the New York Post:

Irked Goldman Sachs brass recently confronted Bloomberg LP over concerns reporters at the business news service have been using the company’s ubiquitous terminals to keep tabs on some employees of the Wall Street bank, The Post has learned.

The ability to snoop on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

Bloomberg confirmed that “limited customer relationship data” has been available to the company’s reporters for some time, although it has never included “clients’ security-level data, position data, trading data or messages”. It has now removed access to the customer information for all its journalists.

The news could be extremely damaging for the company and its billionaire owner New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. The bedrock of his fortune is built on the company’s proprietary terminals, which are rented out to financial firms for over £10,000 a year each and provide huge quantities of real-time information on subjects from financial news to sports results. Although Bloomberg has competitors, like Thompson Reuters, there are few which provide quite the same service, allowing it to maintain its monopoly pricing and, er, charmingly idiosyncratic user interface.

If customers start to believe it can’t be trusted with the incredibly sensitive data that goes through it all the time, that business could start draining away – which would be one of the biggest shake-ups to hit the financial sector since 2008.