Bloomberg Reporters Had Access to Financial Client Data

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Reporters at Bloomberg had the ability to view the login history and certain other account details of the firm's financial clients.

In a mea culpa posted today, Bloomberg News editor in chief Matthew Winkler fessed up to the practice, revealing that reporters had access to terminals through which they could see a user's login history and find out when the account was created.

Reporters also could see "high-level types of user functions," which Winkler compared it to seeing how many times someone used Microsoft Word vs. Excel. Further, they were able to grab information on calls to the firm's help desk.