Ashkan Soltani is the executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency. 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) United States antitrust law, antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. It ...

and an independent privacy and security researcher based in

Washington, DC Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and Federal district of the United States, federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from ...

Education

Soltani attended the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

, 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 (sometimes abbreviated as Berkeley I School) is a graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California. The school was established in 1 ...

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 Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. Soltani previously worked as the primary technical consultant to ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

s "What They Know" series investigating online privacy. In 2011, he testified at two different hearings held by US

Senate A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...

committees focused on privacy related matters. Julia Angwin, in her 2014 book ''Dragnet Nation'', describes Soltani as 'the leading technical expert on ad tracking technology'. He was part of the team at ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' that shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with '' The Guardian US'' and earned the 2014

Gerald Loeb Award The Gerald Loeb Awards, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was e ...

for Large Newspapers for their coverage of the disclosures about surveillance done by the US

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

. (Contributors: Ashkan Soltani and Julie Tate) In 2021, Soltani became the executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency.

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 A zombie (Haitian French: ; ; Kikongo: ''zumbi'') is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies appear in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folkl ...

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 Computer security specialists 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