Ashkan Soltani
| Ashkan Soltani | |
|---|---|
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| Residence | Washington, DC, United States |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Chief Technologist, Federal Trade Commission; Privacy and security researcher |
| Website | www.ashkansoltani.org/ |
Ashkan Soltani was the Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. He was previously an independent privacy and security researcher, based in Washington, DC.
Between 2010 and 2011, he 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. He has also worked as the primary technical consultant to the Wall Street Journal's 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, 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 that shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Guardian US for their coverage of the disclosures about surveillance done by the US National Security Agency.
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.
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