Bloomberg scandal brewing or how it was able to snoop on it's customers..
and continues to snoop on its employees..Bloomberg operates on a big brother basis..
The Bloomberg Spying Scandal Isn’t Surprising — Stalking Is Part Of Its Culture
Visit any of Bloomberg’s 192 offices, and you are forever stored in the system; come back years later, on the other side of the world, and the same photograph will grace your name tag. Employees carry two IDs. The first gets them into the building, logging their locations for anyone on staff to look up. The other—which some Bloomberg customers use, as well—is called a B-Unit, for biometric: It reads their fingerprints to permit home access to their terminals.
The terminal. Nothing captures Bloomberg better than these machines, though these days, it’s usually more accurate to call them pieces of software. A terminal costs about $20,000 a year and, with 315,000 subscriptions around the world, accounted for the bulk of the company’s $7.9 billion in revenue last year. Up-to-date sales figures and other data about the terminals are displayed on screens throughout Bloomberg’s offices.
The promise of the terminal, which it more-or-less fulfils, is quick and unlimited access to any information that might possibly make you money, from credit default swap spreads to sports betting odds. What’s going on at the largest American oil reserve, which holds the crude sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange? Bloomberg commissions a satellite to fly over the site in Cushing, Oklahoma, twice a week and take a picture. Any terminal customer can access the photographs along with estimates of the amount of oil held in the tanks based on the length of the shadows cast across their roofs.
Each of the Bloomberg’s more than 15,000 employees has a terminal, its iconic keyboard and twin screens making the offices resemble a trading floor, and is encouraged to use it as much as possible. Many core functions of the company are conducted with the terminal. Bloomberg’s 2,400 journalists use it to maintain a collective database of sources—contact information, details like children’s names and accolades, and a record of every conversation with that person.
And as the rest of the world just learned, all employees—including, until recently, Bloomberg reporters—have access to potentially sensitive information about terminal users: the last time they logged in, the commands they use, and their chats with customer service. Bloomberg staff have had such access for years.
The company revoked its journalists’ ability to see the data after complaints from one of the company’s biggest customers, Goldman Sachs, which claimed Bloomberg News was using the information to aid its reporting about the bank. Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff, seeking to mollify jittery customers, most of whom work in the obsessively secretive world of finance, called the access for reporters “a mistake
Visit any of Bloomberg’s 192 offices, and you are forever stored in the system; come back years later, on the other side of the world, and the same photograph will grace your name tag. Employees carry two IDs. The first gets them into the building, logging their locations for anyone on staff to look up. The other—which some Bloomberg customers use, as well—is called a B-Unit, for biometric: It reads their fingerprints to permit home access to their terminals.
The terminal. Nothing captures Bloomberg better than these machines, though these days, it’s usually more accurate to call them pieces of software. A terminal costs about $20,000 a year and, with 315,000 subscriptions around the world, accounted for the bulk of the company’s $7.9 billion in revenue last year. Up-to-date sales figures and other data about the terminals are displayed on screens throughout Bloomberg’s offices.
The promise of the terminal, which it more-or-less fulfils, is quick and unlimited access to any information that might possibly make you money, from credit default swap spreads to sports betting odds. What’s going on at the largest American oil reserve, which holds the crude sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange? Bloomberg commissions a satellite to fly over the site in Cushing, Oklahoma, twice a week and take a picture. Any terminal customer can access the photographs along with estimates of the amount of oil held in the tanks based on the length of the shadows cast across their roofs.
Each of the Bloomberg’s more than 15,000 employees has a terminal, its iconic keyboard and twin screens making the offices resemble a trading floor, and is encouraged to use it as much as possible. Many core functions of the company are conducted with the terminal. Bloomberg’s 2,400 journalists use it to maintain a collective database of sources—contact information, details like children’s names and accolades, and a record of every conversation with that person.
And as the rest of the world just learned, all employees—including, until recently, Bloomberg reporters—have access to potentially sensitive information about terminal users: the last time they logged in, the commands they use, and their chats with customer service. Bloomberg staff have had such access for years.
The company revoked its journalists’ ability to see the data after complaints from one of the company’s biggest customers, Goldman Sachs, which claimed Bloomberg News was using the information to aid its reporting about the bank. Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff, seeking to mollify jittery customers, most of whom work in the obsessively secretive world of finance, called the access for reporters “a mistake
http://au.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-scandal-culture-secrecy-spying-2013-5
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