What does Riskopia do?

Riskopia serves as the primary institution of Stephen Cobb, public-interest technologist and researcher. Stephen's work can be found on the Riskopia Substack and a range of other media, linked on the left.

Here is a recent example of Cobb's views on technology, a comment on the Vastamo data breach, as described by Tanmoy Goswami, a fellow of the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University. Goswami noted that: "the therapy notes of 33,000 Finnish citizens were hacked and put on the dark web for ransom by a criminal and at least two people whose data was compromised ended their lives."

Cobb commented that this illustrates a fundamental issue with the way humans currently develop and deploy technology: the failure to adequately address human weaknesses as constraining factors. For example, if you're thinking of using a networked information system to record sensitive information you need to address the fact that A) some people are too weak to resist abusing vulnerabilities in such systems, so protecting that sensitive information will take considerable resources, and B) not enough people are strong enough to resist enjoying the benefits of such a system without meeting the full cost of protecting it from A. 

This situation is largely the result of centuries of excessive optimism about technology, leading humans to keep hoping that "this time will be different." We did it with knitting machines and cars and planes, all of which created excess deaths, excessive inequality of wealth, surges in criminal activity, and existential threats to our planet. And for the last 50 years we've been doing it with computers. All because we habitually fail to factor an honest appraisal of human weaknesses into our cost/benefit and risk/reward analyses. — LinkedIn, 2026

You can contact Stephen and Riskopia via email to Stephen @ Riskopia.com.

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