[1][2] He has previously been the Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission and an independent privacy and security researcher based in Washington, DC.

[5] 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 Journal's "What They Know" series investigating online privacy.

[6] He was part of the team at The Washington Post that shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Guardian US and earned the 2014 Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers[7] for their coverage of the disclosures about surveillance done by the US National Security Agency.

[14] 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.