Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how new networked technologies, such as facial recognition (FR), challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public.

社会发展的实践反映了社会交往中适当的社会规范，例如，一个人应该在什么时候以及在多大程度上尊重另一个人的私人领域的界限。其中一种做法是社会学家欧文·戈夫曼 (Erving Goffman) 所称的公民疏忽——一种对他人表现出适当冷漠的社会规范——它作为一种几乎不为人知但非常有效的隐私保护机制发挥作用。这些做法可能会被提供新形式入侵的技术所破坏。在本文中，我们展示了新的网络技术，如面部识别 (FR)，如何挑战我们练习公民注意力不集中的能力。我们主张有必要在学术和政策辩论中重振公民疏忽和相关实践在规范公共空间行为中的作用。我们的分析强调了隐私的关系性质以及社会规范在实现和保护隐私方面的重要性。虽然我们的分析在某种程度上支持了当前禁止 FR 技术的呼吁，但我们还建议，在禁令出台之前，鉴于规范的力量限制了技术上可能的情况，培养公民疏忽的新做法可能有助于应对挑战FR 和其他形式的公共数字监控提出的。