[Infowarrior] - Goldman outs Bloomberg snoops

[Richard Forno]

(Just goes to show what life within a tightly-controlled technical ecosystem can be like.  ---rick)

Goldman outs Bloomberg snoops

By MARK DeCAMBRE

Last Updated: 9:45 PM, May 9, 2013

http://m.nypost.com/p/news/business/goldman_outs_bloomberg_snoops_ed7SopzVLaO02p9foS7ncM

Talk about a nanny state.

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.

The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.

“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.

“It made us think, ‘Well, what else does [Bloomberg] have access to?,' ” the insider said.

Bloomberg terminals have become the lifeblood of Wall Street trading shops, particularly those that mine their endless reams of data in making daily trading decisions.

It costs Wall Street firms about $20,000 a year to rent each terminal — allowing the company founded by Mayor Bloomberg to ring up annual revenues of more than $6 billion.

Mayor Bloomberg, who is worth about $25 billion, no longer oversees the day-to-day running of Bloomberg LP but controls the privately held company.

In recent weeks, top executives from Goldman have met face-to-face with Bloomberg brass over the potentially explosive issue.

Some Goldman traders are still skittish about how much of their terminal usage can be gleaned by Bloomberg — despite assurances from the news and data service that within 24 hours of being alerted by Goldman it pulled the plug on the function that allowed its reporters to snoop.

A Goldman spokesman confirmed that Bloomberg was taking steps to address the issue.

No reporters have lost their jobs as a result of the snooping issues.

Bloomberg reporters’ ability to access the special so-called customer relationship management (CRM) information features was a holdover from that ’90s era when reporters also worked with the news organizations sales efforts.

“Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists, and has never included clients’ security-level data, position data, trading data or messages,” said Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet.

“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,” he noted.

The highly profitable Wall Street organization was founded in 1983 by Mayor Bloomberg, and the supplemental news unit was launched in the early 1990s.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.