Employee Health Systems - June 2010 Newsletter

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EAP Newsletter - June 2010

In This Issue:

How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time

Tips for Having a Safe Hotel Stay

Are You A Chronic Procrastinator?

You Need to Breathe, Sir!

Are You Addicted to the Internet?

How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutia - birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person's identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

"Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete," said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission's privacy division. "You can find out who an individual is without it."

In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.

So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.

But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency convening a series of workshops on the issue.

Its concerns are hardly farfetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix's recommendation software be at least 10 percent.

On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest - bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be "de-anonymized" by statistically analyzing an individual's distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against indentification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual's actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

"Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing," said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. "In today's online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends."

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive "social signature," researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix's anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Natrayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

"When you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying," Mr. Shmatikov said.
Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 - nearly five million individuals.

Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people - birthdates and city or state of birth.
That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location.The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn't disclose, although they were related to when the person applied, for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government's number-assignment system.

To be sure, the work by Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk. But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could use similar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes.

More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining are largely unregulated. They fear "online redlining," where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.

The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a "do not track" list, similar to the federal "do not call" list, to stop online monitoring.

But Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: "When you're doing stuff online, you should behave as if you're doing it in public - because increasingly, it is."

By Steve Lohr

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These tips from government officials and hotel security experts may help ensure a crime-free hotel stay:

Besides the obvious "I always put work off till the last minute" and "I'm always late to wherever I'm going"...

- Do you often avoid decisions?
- Do you make big plans but then never carry them out?
- Do you avoid trying something new?
- Are you staying in your job despite being unhappy for fear of making a move?
- Do you tend to get sick when you have a task you don't want to do?
- When you don't get something done, do you blame others for it?
- Do you tend to make so many fun plans that it leaves you with no time to do your work?
- Do you avoid arguments?

If you habitually put things off and also answered "yes" to two or more of these questions, you may be a chronic procrastinator.

These steps can help you (or someone you known) break the pattern of procrastination:

1. Articulate what you get out of procrastinating. (Examples: "I avoid risking failure"; "I can't stand to not have fun.") This is what keeps you locked in.
2. Consider the problems your procrastination creates vs. what you think you get out of it. (Example: "I like being a victim, but that means I never get ahead in life.")
3. Start small. Do the least-noxious task to get yourself rolling. Remind yourself along the way - or enlist someone else to remind you - that the actual cost of not doing it is greater than the imagined fear of getting it done.
4. Help a procrastinator: Living or working with a procrastinator can be exasperating. It's easier to be objective about someone else's state of mind than your own. Plus,you aren't being bogged down by anxiety or fear. But rather than blame the procrastinator in your life-which merely perpetuates the cycle of anxiety and delay-describe the story you see him or her acting out. Offer to help break the cycle.

1. Prioritize tasks. If everything seems like a priority, you'll feel overwhelmed and get none of it done. And if nothing seems important, nothing will get done. Create a "to do" list, ranking tasks in order of priority. Marking a specific number of hours to work and to play on your calendar also helps.
2. Question your beliefs. Do you tell yourself that you work better under pressure? Prove it. Do one task at the last minute and one ahead. Test other myths, such as "I don't have the ability" and "It has to be done perfectly."
3. Control your impulsiveness. Most procrastinators jump from one task to the next and never finish anything. Make yourself complete one task before moving on to another.
4. Old habits die hard. Don't expect it to change overnight. If you change one thing a week, you are making progress, and that progress will show you that more change is possible.

By Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychoanalyst in private practice.

Up to 40 percent of us feel anxious on plane flights, according to the Valk Foundation. But you can join the cool-and-collected majority right now. You're reading this article, so you're already halfway there. To take you the rest of the way, we turned to Dr. Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine in Boston. Follow the good doctor's five-step plan to relax here. Or just about anywhere.

Pick a calming focus word, phrase, or prayer, preferable one rooted in a belief system, if you have one. I've found that many patients use words or prayers such as "peace" or "the Lord is my shepherd."

Sit quietly in a comfortable position. Now relax your muscles, moving upward from your toes, calves, abdomen, shoulders, neck, and head.

Take slow, natural breaths. As you do, say your focus word or phrase silently to yourself as you exhale. Don't worry about how well you're doing, just keep at it.

When other thoughts come to mind, recognize that they are normal. Air pressure causing your ears to pop? Relieve the pressure in your ears-chewing gum, swallowing several times-then continue breathing.

Continue breathing and repeating your focus word silently for 10 to 20 minutes. When finished, sit quietly for a minute, allowing other thoughts to seep back in. Then open your eyes and sit silently for another minute. Your brain should feel quiet; you'll notice less static, less noise in your thoughts and sensations.

The Center for Internet Addiction offers a free online assessment to determine if internet addiction is something you should be concerned about.

If you feel that internet addiction is a problem in your life, whether it's yourself or a loved one, consult a counselor or therapist with your concerns. Because internet addiction is a relatively new phenomenon, effective treatment of internet addiction is still an ongoing learning curve. The main thing a good therapist will do is try to determine what the root cause of the problem is, that is, whether or not the internet addiction is the problem, or if internet addiction is merely a symptom of another problem. If you or a loved one has any physical problems due to computer usage, a reputable physician should be consulted in addition to a counselor or therapist.

Like any addiction, internet addiction can be treated. There is help available. If you feel you or a loved one suffers from internet addiction, seek that help immediately be consulting a licensed counselor, physician or therapist in your area.