Create a 'stepback' command. This represents you removing yourself from the crowd and going off into a corner or some such. Codedly, this removes you from the watchlists of all the people in the room, as well as anyone who enters afterwards. People can still "watch" you, but you get a notification (You notice Joebaka is watching you) so if it's someone you're not dealing with you can tell them to fuck off out of your biz if you want. They can also "eavesdrop," a skill based off stealth that maybe lets you get away with listening in without alerting the person. Depending on how crowded the space is, though, you may not catch everything they're saying (as if they were whispering)
So let's say Joe and Jane want to have a private conversation in Carnal Desires. They emote finding a shadowy corner of the club, set an appropriate @tp and both stepback, then watch each other and start talking biz. David is a creep, so he tries to watch Jane and Joe. Both get notified of this, and Joe says back off or I'll shoot you in the face. David gets the message and types ignore Joe and ignore Jane, both of whom get another notification to confirm this. Eli is tricksier, though, and eavesdrops successfully on the pair in the hopes of getting data he can use on them later.
The reason why we need a command like this (well, one of many reasons) is nearly every single bar I have ever seen in this game claims to have booths where people can quietly conduct biz, yet it can be hard to actually represent this. This is a clean way to implement this feeling and the idea you can use the crowd as a curtain while you do your stuff.
If this is implemented alongside cacophony code (which imo is not ideal but whatever) people who are stepped back would need to be omitted from the 'watch all' command.