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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."
I would like to welcome Wall Street and banking institutions (and the financial branches of several governments) to what web consumers have faced for years --- surreptitious tracking without consent, without knowledge, and without any concern for consequences. How does it feel to be treated like a raw material rather than a customer?
Why wasn't there a firewall (in the non-technical sense) between these two sides of the company? Imagine if Google's investment unit used data from user queries to drive their financial decisions.
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
One suspects not.
We used to warn people not to use some company's Whois web interface to check for available domains, because any good names that you typed into that interface would be registered shortly after, "to reserve them for the prospective client".
The title says it all.
They still couldn't find enough to have the bastards thrown in jail. Goldman Sachs doesn't have anything to fear from this useless garbage.
Always knew those cheeky Bloomberg staffers admired my sweet .bash.rc and my fancy PS1! No wonder they were spying on me!!!
You mean that they had the ability to expose massive, economy breaking fraud!? Can't have that.
Give Bloomberg a medal for this. I say they should be able to put video and audio bugs on their terminals. After all, these banks have nothing to hide, right? Except, you know, for LIBOR manipulation, municipal bond market manipulation, commodity price manipulation, VIX manipulation, currency manipulation, monetary policy manipulation, collusion with central banks, bribing public officials, money laundering for drug cartels, money laundering for everyone else, and child sex tourism.
`the same Mayor Bloomberg that tried to limit the size of sodas in New York City to 16 oz. [townhall.com], and started the scandal ridden "Mayors against Guns [saf.org]."'
Yea, without huge-sodas and the ability to blow away your neighbours, America would have fallen to those commie-liberal-bastards a long time ago.
AccountKiller
This surprises me.
The Bloomberg terminal can be used as a trading platform and used to analyze your portfolio (in particular, for big money managers) – so it has a lot of material non-public information. The contracts that you sign with Bloomberg covers that non-public information will not be used by Bloomberg.
I wonder exactly Bloomberg reporters had. From the article it sound like the only info they had was who had a terminal and when the last time they logged on – but I wonder if it was more?
Bloomberg could see when users signed in and signed out of their service! That's awesome, the developers at Bloomberg must be wizards.
This is for when they're at work. They still have to put up with all the shit everybody else does when they surf porn at home, JACKASS!
not even really shocking. That did the journalists have access to? When someone was on or offline. OMFG! Think of what you can do with that. They also had access to what functions they were using. I'm sure the journalists were elated to know that a bond trader at GS was using the Bloomstink terminal to price bonds.
"But as it turned out, what the subscribers were doing was not always confidential. Bloomberg reporters used the "Z function" — a command using the letter Z and a company's name — to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a Bloomberg user could click on a subscriber's name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function. A company spokesman said both of those functions had been disabled in the newsroom. "
America, land of the obese,
Don't worry, Europe is competitive - especially certain countries.
Obesity in America Compared to Europe
Europe is competing with the U.S. for first place in the obesity crisis. According to a report issued by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development out of Paris, more than half of European adults are overweight or obese. Obesity rates have doubled in the past 20 years for the 27 member states of the European Union. It is estimated that 1 in 7 children in these states is obese. The disparity among countries is significant, however. The prevalence of obesity is less than 10 percent in Romania and Italy, but greater than 20 percent in the UK, Ireland and Malta
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home of the gun NUT
Tough Targets - When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens
Stories That Happened In MI
In some countries, the following two people would likely be dead or badly injured. Can you figure out why they aren't?
80-year-old Flint man fires shots at five robbery suspects
Elderly Woman Shoots at Intruder
A rather different picture than what has happened in the UK.
Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control
Self-Defense: An Endangered Right
The withdrawal of a basic right of Englishmen is having dire consequences in Great Britain, and should serve as an object lesson for Americans. Today, in the name of public safety, the British government has practically eliminated the citizens’ right to self-defense. That did not happen all at once. The people were weaned from their fundamental right to protect themselves through a series of policies implemented over some 80 years. Those include the strictest gun regulations of any democracy, legislation that makes it illegal for individuals to carry any article that could be used for personal protection, and restrictive limits on the use of force in self-defense. . . .
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Yea, without huge-sodas and the ability to blow away your neighbours, America would have fallen to those commie-liberal-bastards a long time ago.
It might be too soon to tell.
The IRS’s Tea-Party Targeting
Cheers
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
From the same guy who brought you the New York City Nanny State.....Don't worry Papa Mike knows what's best.
News of the World or something? They can't get away with this; Rupert Murdoch doesn't even own them!
I was once called by a Bloomberg reporter who wanted a comment on the movement of a particularly thinly traded security that I owned. I asked her how she knew to call me, and she replied that I ran news and analytics on that specific ticker regularly on my Bloomberg terminal.
It makes me wonder how often I was front-run by Bloomberg reporters or their cronies over the years.
So I gotta have a two-factor biometric dongle to login to Bloomberg, but their news staff can see everything I do? Great thinking.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
you can always do the equivalent of a "whois" search for a user and it will tell you their status.
This is actually the equivalent of a "finger", not whois.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
and thus Bloomberg employees (or whomever they communicated the information to) could profit enormously from this insider information.
When the inside of computer code, not just built in access to a program, becomes known to an inside coder who decides to go rogue, you get...the $45 million heist from ATMs that just occurred. Is the 'Bloomberg Break In' any different?
Dozens of articles on Slashdot over the last 12 months concern various security flaws and the dozens of ways they are subverted.
There is a real question as to whether keepers of large databases and their executions can be kept safe doing it the way it has been done to date.
What is next?
Man you gun nuts stretch things to insane limits.
So let me recap,
John Stewart condemned Mayor Bloombergs big soda ban.
Mayor Bloomberg ALSO doesn't like guns (which is not surprising in a gun crime riddled city).
You apply John's comment to Bloomberg's anti-gun stance (to which it doesn't apply, except that you want it to).
You then point out that Bloomberg founded Bloomberg.com, the trading and financial data company.
So you did a very tiresome long winding way into promoting guns.
Great, but how many people died of gun crime while you were telling that story? 2? 5?
Not on IRC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irc
You got the order reversed. Now that America has fallen to those commie-liberal-bastards, we can't have huge sodas or blow away intruders trying to rape our wives.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I think the issue here is that the reporters knew not just that the user was not logged in currently, but that the user had not logged on for a while.
Additionally, using of functions is really borderline of insider information. I bet if Bloomberg reporters knew that a certain oil industry banker at Goldman Sachs was looking up Nigerian and Indonesian exchange rates, it would be easy enough to guess that this banker is either trying to buy or sell an oil company with operations in Indonesia and Nigeria. If you know if this was a probable buy, you buy the stock ahead of Goldman's clients and Step 3) Profit!!.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Oh noes, my one-sided imaginary relationship with Betty Liu is terminated!
you can elect to not show that information (you show grey rather than green or red) although that's not the default setting.
I was once called by a Bloomberg reporter who wanted a comment on the movement of a particularly thinly traded security that I owned. I asked her how she knew to call me, and she replied that I ran news and analytics on that specific ticker regularly on my Bloomberg terminal.
It makes me wonder how often I was front-run by Bloomberg reporters or their cronies over the years.
Blooter did what?
That's factually incorrect. If you read the press release, you will see that journalists (or any internal users for that matter) don't have access to clients' trading or portfolio information at all. What we're talking about here are some user stats, such as log-in/log-out and functionality-used information.
QuantumPete