Bloomberg reporters snoop into Bloomberg customer personal data

Reporters pulled up subscribers’ private information through the company’s data terminals to break news.

Bloomberg journalists “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.”

Nearly every banking and trading company owns a Bloomberg terminal. 

Bloomberg reporters’ did so by using the “Z function” — a command using the letter Z and a company’s name — to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a reporter could click on a subscriber’s name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then “provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function.”

The company has yanked reporters’ access to these terminal functions.

Additional report by The New York Post