Traders Angry, Disappointed in Bloomberg Privacy Breach
Source: The Street
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Traders and other Wall Street professionals expressed anger and disappointment that Bloomberg LP, owner of the widely-used financial data and information service, had allowed its news reporters to access personal information about individual users despite complaints from investment banking clients and their employees.
Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler, in a column that served as a company statement on the matter, acknowledged that reporters have had access to some client information considered proprietary since the 1990s. Winkler's admission follows a Goldman Sachs (GS_) complaint to Bloomberg last month that one of its reporters used personal information about a client's terminal usage to further a story.
Winkler acknowledged in a column entitled "Holding Ourselves Accountable," that reporters had access to information about how often and in what manner Bloomberg clients, many of whom are bankers and portfolio managers regularly in the news, use the terminals. Bloomberg leases its terminal for about $20,000 a year for making trades and accessing financial information on companies, funds and individuals.
"The revelations of this encroach upon the broader privacy issue that all Bloomberg users should be concerned about," Keith Bliss, senior vice president at Cuttone & Co., a New York-based brokerage, said in a phone interview. "We're paying them handsomely for a service, and we expect our privacy to be maintained. If their looking inside the system is violating privacy policies to get leads on stories, nobody can be too happy about that."
Read more: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11921373/1/traders-angry-disappointed-in-bloomberg-privacy-breach.html
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SO after decades of data mining peoples credit card histories and online purchase records for marketing data, the big banks are outraged, OUTRAGED that someone might reverse the tables on them.
