Essentially we value privacy and it is important to

see in the latter half of the essay how third-party cookies violate this component of deontology.
Essentially, we value privacy and it is important to us not only because there are many things
we wish to keep to ourselves or particular others, but an invasion of privacy leads to treating
an individual as non-autonomous and as a mere means to an end.
Let us turn to the consequences of not respecting one’s privacy in regards to third-party
cookies. One advancement of computer technology is making “possible the accumulation
and correlation of vast amounts of data on each individual.”
14
It would be useful here to
9
De George, 45.
10
De George, 43.
11
De George, 205.
12
De George, 50.
13
De George, 50.
14
De George, 40.
63
NALINI ELISA RAMLAKHAN

look at an argument presented by Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt in “Bigger Monster,
Weaker Chains”. Although speaking about the problems of privacy in regards to data surveil-
lance, posing a hypothetical Big Brother society similar to Orwell’s, Stanley and Steinhardt’s
argument is useful and helpful when considering privacy in cyberspace. Stanley and Steinhardt
bring attention to the consequences of living in a Big Brother society and how it would have
an impact on each individual, and conclude that a constant surveillance on individuals is a
threat to privacy, and that certain steps must be taken to ensure that data surveillance is in
conformity with our value of privacy, or else we will end up being identified and profiled
through this method of tracking.
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By being constantly watched on video surveillance, citizens
will not have the right to privacy, and it will make citizens feel as if their right to privacy is
not being respected. According to Stanley and Steinhardt’s argument, although citizens will
only be taped and watched in the public sphere, many places in the public realm have a sense
of privacy. Let me elucidate. While we cannot expect a full amount of privacy in the public
realm, we can expect that we will not be constantly observed and watched. This is also a
form of privacy because individuals expect not to be stalked or constantly observed by others
who can gather their information while not having consent to do so. While many argue for
the implementation of constant data surveillance, Stanley and Steinhardt argue that “data
surveillance is the collection of information about an identifiable individual, often from
multiple sources, that can be assembled into a portrait of that person ’ s activities. ”
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This
is the role third-party cookies play in cyberspace. The impact of this is that it is much easier
to accumulate information about an individual and identify an individual from the websites
they visit and information they enter. It allows businesses to have more access to an individual
than an individual would actually allow. Without consent for this information, it is a direct
violation of one’s privacy. The accumulation of information of an individual without consent
also violates an individual’s autonomy by not allowing an individual to make a rational
choice of consent.