Peter Eckersley

Early life and education Peter Daniel Eckersley was born in 1978

Eckersley moved to the United States, settling in San Francisco, California. There, he started working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and set up a sharehouse, where he lived with roommates including computer scientist and activist Aaron Swartz.

Career and activism

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

Shortly before his death, Eckersley was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was remembered by the Wall Street Journal as an "Australian computer scientist," who "worked at a San Francisco nonprofit on projects designed to protect privacy."