The Nature of the Risk
by Glenn Caleval
Walking Dolphins Consultancy has a rough & quick method to determine what they refer to as “the index of action” that guides clients in strategic business decisions. It is an elementary application of risk assessment tools, but one which can be easily understood and used by internet parents. The index of action is the strength of the need to act to prevent or guard against a particular risk profile.
The elements needed to judge your index action are the likelihood that a thing will happen, the amount of harm that the thing would cause and the resources required to prevent it. Let’s look at the various combinations.
The very lowest index of action would come from a situation where the possibility of something happening is very small, the amount of possible harm is very small and the cost in resources to prevent it is very high. That scenario provides a near-zero index of action, meaning go about your business and forget it.
Secondly, if the possibility of something happening is very high, but the amount of harm would be extremely small, then probably no resources are justified to prevent it. Even if it is a certainty to happen, if the resources required to prevent it exceed the amount of harm to be caused, then still nothing should be done to stop it.
You get the idea.
(Probability of Event x Degree of Harm) - Cost of Prevention = Index of Action
This is not a formula you can plug numbers into, but a way of thinking about what you should do. It can also help you focus on the various risks with more clarity.
Consider the opposite extremes. The probability of a particular event happening may be very small, but the degree of harm extremely large. The index of action may be very large even if the cost of prevention is high. The chances of an asteroid impacting the earth and ending most life on the planet is quite small. But the loss of most life on the planet is such a high degree of harm that even a small chance demands action. Therefore we have scientists around the world trying to track asteroids, government space agencies developing powerful rockets capable of moving asteroids off their orbits and so on. The resources being spent are certainly measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is justified because if the event occurs unchecked, there will be no dollars and no people to worry about them.
By the same token, keeping in mind that statistically you should not panic about the direct threats to your children’s physical safety posed by the internet, the degree of harm represented by a dead, raped or kidnapped child is so high that action is demanded.
Take this a step further and consider that some risks have a relatively high chance of happening and a relatively high degree of damage. These risks involve internet stalking, cyber-bullying, identity theft, remote child pornography, attacking emotional bonds of the family and so on.
Why does the Secure Surfing Organization suggest that these particular risks are relatively high?
Some facts. As of May 1, 2007 United States government representatives disclosed that there were at least 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. State Attorneys had identified 29,000 of them on just one web site. Check current news on web predators at the Secure Surfing News Site.
Essential perspective: these numbers only count the convicts required to register or the relatively stupid convicts who used their real names to register on the web site. If 600,000 have been caught and forced to register, it is naive to believe there are not hundreds of thousands who have not been caught.
Watch a few episodes of Dateline’s To Catch a Predator. Of the hundreds of child predators that NBC series has caught, none of them have been registered sex offenders. And these are genuine web predators. They found their victims on the internet and were willing to physically come to your house to victimize your child.
Now. We may appear to be sending conflicting messages. On the one hand, we tell you not to panic over the physical safety of your child and we counsel you not to try to impose a total internet ban. Then we give you all these scary statistics and remind you about the televised web predators caught in their hundreds.
What we believe the statistics mean is that it is still rare for children to be physically assaulted because of internet use. But the fact that there are so many deviants out there means there is a relatively high chance that children will be electronically exposed to them.
Remember that this Index of Action tool is used for strategic planning for businesses. We are suggesting you will benefit greatly from engaging in some strategic planning for your family.
Work your way through the various articles and explanations on this site and consider your index of action for the risks you can identify.
Accepting our advice on spending some money for professional third party software would end up costing you as much as 85 cents a day and that is if you accept all of our advice and buy the highest level of the products offered. Accepting our advice on the free software will cost you the time to download and install it and in some cases a short learning curve.
You have to decide if those costs are more to be avoided than the series of events from which to be protected.
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