Amy Chozik and Ben Protess report on what the NYT calls a privacy breach, but is also a security breach, in my opinion:
A shudder went through Wall Street on Friday after the revelation that Bloomberg News reporters had extracted subscribers’ private information through the company’s ubiquitous data terminals to break news.
The company confirmed that reporters at Bloomberg News, the journalism arm of Bloomberg L.P., had for years used the company’s terminals to monitor when subscribers had logged onto the service and to find out what types of functions, like the news wire, corporate bond trades or an equities index, they had looked at. Bloomberg terminals, which cost an average of more than $20,000 a year, are found in nearly every banking and trading company.
Bloomberg said the functions that allowed journalists to monitor subscribers were a mistake and were promptly disabled after Goldman Sachs complained that a Bloomberg reporter had, while inquiring about a partner’s employment status, pointed out that the partner had not logged onto his Bloomberg terminal lately.
Read more on NY Times.
Zachary Seward has a companion piece on Quartz, called, What Bloomberg employees can see when they snoop on customers.