Terminalgate

A Chinese wall between media arms and data services

Bloomberg's "Terminalgate" raises a new set of awkward questions about the ethical limits organisations running media and related businesses must impose upon themselves. Until April, Bloomberg's journalists had access to the login and usage data of its terminal subscription clients. They used those data to gain an edge in information gathering. This practice only stopped after Goldman Sachs, a major Bloomberg client, complained about it. A Bloomberg reporter had enquired about the employment status of a Goldman partner, remarking that the person concerned had not logged into the Bloomberg system for a while. Bloomberg has apologised publicly and assured its terminal clients that it has since restricted journalistic access to its client data. It has also created a position of Data Compliance Officer to ensure such breaches of privacy do not recur.

However, the matter may not end here. The data available to Bloomberg journalists included information about messages sent through the Bloomberg system, help desk queries by clients, and specific items accessed on the system by users. Apparently Bloomberg's journalists had access to these data for at least two years. Among other institutions, the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are reportedly investigating possible leaks involving the surfing patterns of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. To put it mildly, this is sensitive. The privately held Bloomberg (founder and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg owns 88 per cent) is the world's largest provider of financial data and analytics. While it is also a flourishing news service with over 2,400 journalists on its payroll, Bloomberg earned over 80 per cent of its 2012 revenues of $7.9 billion from its 315,000-odd subscription terminals. Those terminals, which rent at over $20,000 per annum, are ubiquitous in trading rooms and central banks. Knowing who viewed which data set and their follow-up queries is worth a lot. If the client in question is the Fed chairman or the Goldman CEO, the value of that information climbs exponentially. There are even questions to be raised about access to non-anonymous information for Bloomberg's sales staff. Like most data services (including search engines), Bloomberg personalises offerings using algorithms to analyse the client's surfing pattern and offer related products and functions. Such data should ideally be anonymised since these could easily shade into being insider information.

The need to erect Chinese walls between the media arms and the data services, and to anonymise client data, is obvious. Bloomberg is not the only player in this game - Reuters, for instance, provides similar services. Everybody collects and analyses customer data in their efforts to optimise offerings and everybody must sequester such data from their respective media arms at the very least. This is a new dimension to media ethics. By convention, media houses preserve journalistic independence by erecting Chinese walls between editorial and advertising. When it comes to media access to client data usage, there can be little debate. The right hand must not know what the left is doing.