That the internet is a risky place may be one of those self evident truisms. But the probability of something bad happening can be hard to calculate (or maybe we think it just won’t happen to us). That probability should be multiplied by the resulting cost, should the bad thing happen – perhaps easier to conceive the disaster of losing something important. (There is a rule of thumb that it takes multiple hard disk disasters before a typical user wakes up the fact they need to have a backup system.) Most of us evaluate ‘Expectation Value’ all the time, but we are not always as good at it as we think and commonly confuse a bad consequence, which might be highly damaging and disruptive and the probability, which might be extremely low.
This blog is designed around @ourlocality’s needs to encourage safer online practices and to flag up some of the dangers inherent in using and publishing on the web, using email and cloud based services.