The Huffington Post. Bloomberg accused of terminal spying for news leads

The multinational financial mass media corporation Bloomberg has been accused of spying on some of its 315,000 customers that use the market-data terminals, sparking outrage among, most notably, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase who said Bloomberg violated their privacy.

On Friday, the New York Post reported Goldman Sachs to be first to have complained to Bloomberg about spying by its reporters. The financial news giant said it addressed the complaint within 24 hours by urgently closing some of the windows its reporters had allegedly used to check up on customers' activities to find potential stories.

Some of Bloomberg’s interviewed employees confessed they feared for the company’s reputation. “You never want to show up in the paper for something like this,” one of them was cited as telling the Huffington Post.

According to the media, Bloomberg News reporters tracked how often customers had logged onto terminals and how many times a month they had entered specific commands on a terminal, for instance to check information about foreign currencies or pull up economic indicators.

With these tools, Bloomberg could keep loose tabs on terminal users, including government officials and high-profile investors and traders, to get leads to news scoops, the company’s ultimate goal.
Bloomberg makes up one third of the $16 billion global financial data market, with estimated revenue of $7.6 billion, as of 2011.