Ashkan Soltani is the executive director of the

California Privacy Protection Agency The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is a California state government agency created by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). As the first dedicated privacy regulator in the United States, the agency implements and enforce ...

. He has previously been the Chief Technologist of the

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction ov ...

and an independent privacy and security researcher based in Washington, DC.

Education

Soltani attended the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

, where he received a bachelor's degree in cognitive science. Soltani would later receive a master's degree from the

University of California, Berkeley School of Information The University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, also known as the UC Berkeley School of Information or the I School, is a graduate school and, created in 1994, the newest of the schools at the University of California, Berkel ...

Career in government

Between 2010 and 2011, Soltani worked for the US Federal Trade Commission as a staff technologist in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he assisted with the investigations of Google and Facebook. Soltani previously worked as the primary technical consultant to '' The Wall Street Journals "What They Know" series investigating online privacy. In 2011, he testified at two different hearings held by US Senate committees focused on privacy related matters.

Julia Angwin Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and entrepreneur. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology ...

, in her 2014 book ''Dragnet Nation'', describes Soltani as 'the leading technical expert on

ad tracking Ad tracking, also known as post-testing or ad effectiveness tracking, is in-market research that monitors a brand’s performance including brand and advertising awareness, product trial and usage, and attitudes about the brand versus their comp ...

technology'. He was part of the team at '' The Washington Post'' that shared the 2014

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalis ...

with ''

The Guardian US ''Guardian US'' is the Manhattan-based American online presence of the British print newspaper ''The Guardian''. It launched in September 2011, led by editor-in-chief Janine Gibson, and followed the earlier ''Guardian America'' service, which was ...

'' and earned the 2014 Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers for their coverage of the disclosures about surveillance done by the US National Security Agency. (Contributors: Ashkan Soltani and Julie Tate) In 2021, Soltani became the executive director of the

Subjects of research

Flash cookie research

Soltani's first high-profile research project was a 2009 study, supported by the National Science Foundation's Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Computing, documenting the use of zombie Flash cookies by several online advertising networks. Soltani and his colleagues at Berkeley revealed that websites were recreating tracking cookies after consumers deleted them by storing the unique tracking identifiers in Flash cookies, which were not automatically deleted when consumers cleared their browser cookies. After the publication of Soltani's research, class action law firms filed suit against several advertising networks and websites. Quantcast, Clearspring and VideoEgg collectively agreed to pay a total of $3.4 million to settle the lawsuits.

ETag tracking research

In 2011, Soltani and Berkeley law professor Chris Hoofnagle published a follow-up study, documenting the use of web browser cache ETags to store persistent identifiers. As with the case of Flash cookies, the identifiers stored in the ETags persisted even after consumers deleted their browser cookies. The ETag tracking issue caught the attention of several members of

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...

, who wrote to the Federal Trade Commission in September 2011 and urged the agency to investigate the use of advanced tracking technologies as a potentially unfair or deceptive business practice. Several companies performing ETag based tracking that were identified by the research team were subsequently sued by class action lawyers. In January 2013, KISSmetrics, an online advertising network, settled its ETag related lawsuit for $500,000.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Soltani, Ashkan Living people People associated with computer security American computer scientists University of California, Berkeley School of Information alumni Gerald Loeb Award winners for Large Newspapers Year of birth missing (living people) Federal Trade Commission personnel