From 2006 to 2018, Eckersley worked at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in roles including technology projects director, chief computer scientist, and head of AI policy. Eckersley advocated openly for
net neutrality while with the EFF. In 2007, Eckersley and other collaborators conducted a controlled experiment to prove that the
Comcast telecommunications company tampered with
peer-to-peer protocols such as
BitTorrent through the use of forged
reset packets. Eckersley was prominent in internet privacy, openly critical of
web tracking technologies and companies that use them. In 2007, he criticised
Facebook for their lack of transparency in user tracking services as well as the use by internet service providers of
deep packet inspection of peer-to-peer networks to seek out
copyright infringement, often relying purely on
IP addresses to identify users in court. His later work in this field resulted in the Panopticlick, an EFF website to test the identifiability of users'
web browsers, as well as advocacy for stronger enforcement of the
Do Not Track header. He collaborated in that work with
Aaron Swartz, another online privacy advocate with close ties to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2012, Eckersley co-founded
Let's Encrypt alongside developers from the
Mozilla Corporation and the
University of Michigan. A year after its launch, Let's Encrypt announced they had signed one million certificates. As of September 2022, Let's Encrypt had validated certificates for over 290 million domains. Many other web-scale services for securing sites have built on the certificate infrastructure provided by Let's Encrypt, including
Certbot,
Caddy, and Traefik. Eckersley was outspoken against the centralisation of
cloud hosting providers, particularly that of
AWS, fearing that cloud providers could be compelled to look into users' data. In 2018, he began focusing on artificial intelligence, with research and policy work focused on applications including
predictive policing,
autonomous vehicles,
cybersecurity and
military uses of artificial intelligence. In 2021 he co-founded a non-profit pursuing similar goals, the
AI Objectives Institute, which was conceived as an institute focused on identifying and aligning the objectives of AI with those of society, and interrogating the values and politics around artificial intelligence. He was also a visiting senior fellow at
OpenAI. Two of his popular papers,
How Unique Is Your Browser? and
On Locational Privacy, highlighted how vulnerable the internet was to
browser fingerprinting and
location tracking over time as ways of piercing privacy and anonymity. == Death ==