PAY THROUGH THE NOSE FOR A BLOOMBERG TERMINAL, GET SNOOPED ON BY BLOOMBERG REPORTERS?

Talk about a nanny state.

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.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.

“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.

“It made us think, ‘Well, what else does [Bloomberg] have access to?,’ ” the insider said.

I wonder if this will hurt their business. It seems like a major security problem. But at least there’s accountability: “No reporters have lost their jobs as a result of the snooping issues.”

This raises serious insider-trading concerns. With this kind of security problem, it would seem like a breach of fiduciary duty to use these terminals.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’ve been using the Bloomberg system for over 25 years, at 3 firms now. I’m as close to a user expert as you get. I can tell you that my Bloomberg rep told me that they can ( and do) routinely monitor or look up individual user activity and have been doing this since at least 10 years ago. They told me the information is summarized and given to the reps when they head into the field so that they will better know what customer interests are, and can customize training and advice to each user. I actually found it a refreshing and welcome customer service.

The infuriating thing about this story is that Bloomberg’s customer service would seem to a porous broken vessel of information. Bloomberg’s reporters have no business accessing sensitive customer data – which by the way also includes user portfolio holdings and trading information. If I was a hedge fund manager, I’d be on the phone blistering my Bloomie rep about about just how much of my propretary research and trading strategy was blowing around their Newsroom. I’m a pension fund manager for a $7Billion fund, and I know I’ll at least be grilling them slowly over the spit tomorrow.

I’m guessing there will be many doing that.