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

Mike Masnick — Mon, 13 May 2013 03:33:00 PDT

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.

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United Airlines Shares Plummet 75% On Misinformation; Blame Game Begins

Dennis Yang — Tue, 9 Sep 2008 13:01:43 PDT

Shares of United Airlines' stock tumbled nearly 75% on Monday after an old 2002 report about a United Airlines bankruptcy filing was picked up and circulated as current. How did this happen? Apparently, a staffer at Income Securities Advisors Inc. did a search for "united bankruptcy 2008" on Google, and found an article on the Sun-Sentinel. Though the article was published in 2002, neither the Googlebot nor the Sun-Sentinel website indicated as much, and the news item was published to Income Securities' page on Bloomberg. Once the story hit the wire, shares plummeted from $12 to as low as $3, and 54 million shares traded hands before Nasdaq halted trading to investigate what was going on. After United issued an official "we're really not bankrupt" statement and the confusion started to lift, shares of United returned to a somewhat normal price.

After all the dust has settled, the finger pointing has now begun. Who is to blame, if anyone? Sure, the Sun-Sentinel published the story on its site with an ambiguous date, but having archived articles on your site isn't a problem. However, they should really make the dates on their articles more obvious, since they apparently have pretty good SEO. As for Google, they are indeed guilty of publishing an inaccurate date, but as we've seen before, their usual recourse is to blame the site for the problem, and, that said, their terms of service clearly state that they are not liable for the accuracy of their data. As for Income Securities and Bloomberg, perhaps they will be more careful next time before they publish stories, or perhaps not. The thing is, mistakes happen (like Bloomberg publishing Steve Jobs' obituary last month) and rumors turn out to be false every day. Income Securities will "pay" for their mistake, since now they will need to earn back the trust of their clients.

For stock traders, timely information translates into moneymaking opportunities. A few decades ago, it would take a few days for the market to react to information (thereby creating a nice opportunity for the shrewd trader). Today, the speed with which information travels (and the market reacts) has increased considerably, as is clearly illustrated by this event. Sure, shares of United are still trading at approximately 10% less than its opening price on Monday, but perhaps that's more a reflection of the fact that a chapter 11 filing would not come as a surprise to anyone at this time. So, it appears that, in actuality, it's pointless to assign blame, since there doesn't seem to be a problem -- the system worked just as it should.

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

United Airlines Shares Plummet 75% On Misinformation; Blame Game Begins