Surveillance in the liquid modern times

Surveillance, nowadays especially provided by information and communication technology, is at the core of social control that has been largely commoditised and privatized.Consumer culture gives hope for freedom lives, challenging the social hierarchies that dominated the earlier – in Bauman’s vocabulary, “solid” – phase of modernity. The aim of this paper is to present two of many tools, which are used by biggest IT companies to keep under surveillance the individuals, societies and nations in the Liquid Modern Times. There has been the socio-cultural context of Internet’s development analyzed to fnd the premises that led to a transformation of cyberspace from a freedom to a surveillance place, and conducted a case study of Facebook’s facial recognition technology and Google Street View practices. Non-reactive research methods have been used in the paper.