On Tuesday, August 11, 2015, Harvard launches the first issue of Technology Science with a series of original research papers with revelations about weaknesses in Facebook’s privacy policies, price differences in travel sites based on country of booking, and an unusual rate spike among the largest health insurers under Obamacare.
Technology Science is founded by a group of 47 researchers, professors, and legal experts from 30 universities around the world with original research on the unforeseen consequences of technology on society. It is published by the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University with Professor Latanya Sweeney serving as editor-in-chief.
The findings of the articles at launch include:
- How Facebook responds to public pressure after a demonstration of the highly visible years of geolocation data collected by the company on its users (link)
- How the largest insurers increased their rates from 2014 to 2015 on ACA mandated state exchanges by 75% more than smaller insurers in the same state (link)
- How consumers can find far higher prices for hotels and rental cars on Kayak.com for the same U.S. hotel rooms and cars when searching from an international location (link)
- How Facebook’s privacy policy generally decreased in clarity and protections from 2005 to 2015 when scored on a privacy rights framework (link)
- How the challenging roll-out of the United Kingdom’s care.data program teaches lessons for future efforts to centralize the collection of health care data (link)