Monday, May 13, 2013

This kind of thing...

..has been going on a long time.  Once you have control of information access, that logical step is to scale that into more aggressive uses.  To use a "hypothetical":  SUPPOSE that you hold a strange or thinly-held security and actively monitored said security using your "ubiquitous information and quoting terminal".  Someone who works for that information service could (since they know your identity) infer your entire portfolio holdings.

This is a big deal.  And players big and small have griped and snipped, but it now appears they have had enough and are going to media competitors to spread the word.  Reuters and others must be loving this.

Talk about a nanny state.
Irked Goldman Sachs brass recently confronted Bloomberg LP over concerns reporters
at the business news service have been using the company’s ubiquitous terminals to
keep tabs on some employees of the Wall Street bank, The Post has learned.
The ability to spy on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman
officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a 
wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.
In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the 
bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his 
Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

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