Privacy problems continue to plague Bloomberg and its prized financial information terminals.
The Financial Times newspaper reports more than 10,000 private messages sent between Bloomberg’s terminal clients were found online via a Google search. The messages — sent “between traders at dozens of the world’s largest banks and their clients,” the paper reports — had been posted on the Internet for several years.
FT says the messages contained the real names of Bloomberg’s terminal clients, email addresses and confidential financial information among other things.
The messages were removed from the Internet when the paper inquired about them.
A Bloomberg spokesman is quoted in the article as saying the “work was done with client consent, where emails were explicitly forwarded to us to a dedicated email account and released by the person responsible for the email so that we could conduct internal testing to improve our technology for the client,” whatever that means.
The leak comes amid recent criticism of how journalists at Bloomberg’s news operation were using its terminals to gather seemingly private information on the company’s financial data clients. Bloomberg admitted over the weekend that the company had, for years, allowed reporters to execute a function on the terminal that would yield login and search information for Bloomberg’s clients, including bankers, traders and government officials.
Bloomberg says it has revoked access to the feature within its newsroom, adding that allowing its reporters to gather that kind of information on its terminal clients was a “mistake.”
Financial Times: Private messages from Bloomberg terminal posted online
