Sharon Tamar, Koops Bert-Jaap
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT), Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Ethics Inf Technol. 2021;23(3):331-343. doi: 10.1007/s10676-020-09575-7. Epub 2021 Jan 16.
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.
社会会形成一些反映社交互动中适当性社会规范的行为方式，例如，一个人应该在何时以及在何种程度上尊重他人私人领域的界限。其中一种行为方式就是社会学家欧文·戈夫曼所说的“礼貌性忽视”——即对他人表现出适度冷漠的社会规范——它作为一种几乎不被注意却极为有效的隐私保护机制发挥着作用。这些行为方式可能会被带来新的侵扰形式的技术所扰乱。在本文中，我们展示了诸如面部识别（FR）等新型网络技术如何挑战我们践行礼貌性忽视的能力。我们主张，在学术和政策辩论中，有必要重振礼貌性忽视及相关行为方式在规范公共空间行为方面的作用。我们的分析凸显了隐私的关系性本质以及社会规范在实现和保护隐私方面的重要性。虽然我们的分析在一定程度上支持了当前禁止面部识别技术的呼声，但我们也建议，在禁令实施之前，鉴于规范有能力限制原本在技术上可行的事情，培养新的礼貌性忽视行为方式可能有助于应对面部识别及其他形式的公共数字监控所带来的挑战。
