Here’s a moderately informative activity for a Friday afternoon.
Log on to your Bloomberg terminal. Type UUID <GO>
Unless you’re a Bloomberg employee you should see something like this:
Many Bloomberg employees, up until recently, would have seen something very different.
The UUID is the terminal ID number of Bloomberg subscribers. Once you have the ID you can look up a whole bunch of other things – everything from the last time the user logged on to the service to what functions they are accessing.
For a Bloomberg reporter covering, say, financial services, this was a handy feature!
Until now, of course.
The New York Post reports on Friday:
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 snoop 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.
…
A Goldman spokesman confirmed that Bloomberg was taking steps to address the issue.
…
“Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists, and has never included clients’ security-level data, position data, trading data or messages,” said Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet.
“In light of [Goldman’s] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients,” he noted.
It’s not hard to imagine senior Goldman Sachs executives – some of the most paranoid people in the world – being shocked to discover the power of the Bloomberg terminal, and the host of personal information Bloomberg employees can access through it.
What is more surprising is the fact that this has never come to light before. Ex-Bloomberg employees (this Alphaville contributor included) have been aware of the power of UUID for a long time. It’s only one of the, erm, “informational advantages” that comes from working at Bloomberg. Another prominent one being the internal database reporters are required to contribute to on a regular basis. That database includes personal contact details of their sources – readily accessible to other Bloomberg employees – as well as personal details such as the names of their children, favourite foods and hobbies.
Needless to say, there is an obvious conflict here. Bloomberg has built a semi-monopoly when it comes to financial terminals. Some of that success, it must be noted, comes from this kind of data-mining of users’ information
UUID is a commercial function intended for sales people who can go to the client and say; “We see you like this function and are interested in this subject. Perhaps you would also enjoy these functions and features.”
But the blurring of the commercial side with Bloomberg’s well-respected newswire, is a problem.
And one that has finally come to light thanks to some, for once, well-placed paranoia at Goldman.