Ashkan Soltani

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.

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.

In November 2011, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had settled its investigation into online advertising network ScanScout, one of the advertising networks named in Soltani's research study. According to the FTC complaint, the company had deceptively claimed that consumers could opt out of receiving targeted ads by changing their computer’s web browser settings to block cookies.

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, 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.