The unanswered questions in the Bloomberg scandal

Stephen Gandel, a senior editor at Fortune, writes about what he considered to be the six big unanswered questions in the Bloomberg snooping scandal.

Here are two of them:

How much more info did Bloomberg reporters have access to than the rest of us?

But just because you put up the grey dot doesn’t mean that Bloomberg reporters weren’t able to track your usage. A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment on this point. Doctoroff and Winkler have tried to explain it away, but it’s not clear how much info Bloomberg reporters had access to. They say the special access was cut off last month.

Bloomberg has confirmed that their reporters had access to a log-on history. Beyond that it’s not clear. Winkler said the reports could only see aggregate user data, “akin to being able to see how many times someone used Microsoft Word vs. Excel.” But other ex-Bloomberg reporters have said that you could type in a specific person and see the types of things they were looking at. So that doesn’t sound like aggregate data. And what exactly is the Bloomberg terminal equivalent of Word and Excel? Some reports have said that Bloomberg reporters were able to tell who read their stories. That seems like detailed snooping.

Will banks sue Bloomberg?

The revelation that Bloomberg reporters were spying on clients came to light after complaints from Goldman. But now it appears, according to latest reporting from the New York Times, that pretty much every big bank has had some beef with Bloomberg. All of a sudden that unexplained leak makes sense. Remember being stumped by who a “source with knowledge of the bank’s activities” was? Well that source was your Bloomberg terminal.

It’s not clear they can sue, but if they do they will have a good case. Fortune has a Bloomberg terminal. And it looks like the contract we signed with Bloomberg, which appears to be the generic one used by the company, gives its employees the right to spy on us in two places. In one place, the contract states, “Lessee [Fortune] acknowledges and understand that Lessor [Bloomberg] may monitor, solely for operational reasons, Lessee’s general use of the Service.” One could interpret that to mean Bloomberg could only use the information to make sure the unit was operating properly. But Bloomberg could argue that the statement referred to anything that improved its users “operational” experience. And if a particularly embarrassing story about you improved other users’ experience that day, then Bloomberg seems to be covered.

Read the rest here.