An Information Hazard (or infohazard for short) is some true information that could harm people, or other sentient beings, if known. It is tricky to determine policies on information hazards. Some information might genuinely be dangerous, but excessive controls on information has its own perils.

This tag is for discussing the phenomenon of Information Hazards and what to do with them. Not for actual Information Hazards themselves.

An example might be a formula for easily creating cold fusion in your garage, which would be very dangerous. Alternatively, it might be an idea that causes great mental harm to people.

Bostrom's Typology of Information Hazards

Nick Bostrom coined the term information hazard in a 2011 paper [1] for Review of Contemporary Philosophy. He defines it as follows:

Information hazard: A risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.

Bostrom points out that this is in contrast to the generally accepted principle of information freedom and that, while rare, the possibility of information hazards needs to be considered when making information policies. He proceeds to categorize and define a large number of sub-types of information hazards. For example, he defines artificial intelligence hazard as:

Artificial intelligence hazard: There could be computer-related risks in which the threat would derive primarily from the cognitive sophistication of the program rather than the specific properties of any actuators to which the system initially has access.

The following table is reproduced from Bostrom 2011 [1].

TYPOLOGY OF INFORMATION HAZARDS
I. By information transfer mode
	Data hazard
	Idea hazard
	Attention hazard
	Template hazard
	Signaling hazard
	Evocation hazard
II. By effect
	TYPE	SUBTYPE
ADVERSARIAL RISKS	Competiveness hazard	Enemy Hazard
		Intellectual property hazard
		Commitment hazard
		Knowing-too-much hazard
RISKS TO SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND MARKETS	Norm hazard	Information asymmetry Hazard
		Unveiling hazard
		Recognition hazard
RISKS OF IRRATIONALITY AND ERROR	Ideological hazard
	Distraction and temptation hazard
	Role model hazard
	Biasing hazard
	De-biasing hazard
	Neuropsychological hazard
	Information-burying hazard
RISKS TO VALUABLE STATES AND ACTIVITIES	Psychological reaction hazard	Disappointment hazard
		Spoiler hazard
		Mindset hazard
	Belief-constituted value hazard
	(mixed)	Embarrassment hazard
RISKS FROM INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS	Information system hazard	Information infrastructure failure hazard
		Information infrastructure misuse hazard
		Artificial intelligence hazard
RISKS FROM DEVELOPMENT	Development hazard

See Also

Dangerous Knowledge
Computation Hazards

References

Bostrom, N. (2011). "Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge". Review of Contemporary Philosophy 10: 44-79.