Promiscuous mode refers to the special mode of Ethernet hardware, in particular network interface cards (NICs), that allows a NIC to receive all traffic on the network, even if it is not addressed to this NIC. By default, a NIC ignores all traffic that is not addressed to it, which is done by comparing the destination address of the Ethernet packet with the hardware address (a.k.a. MAC) of the device. While this makes perfect sense for networking, non-promiscuous mode makes it difficult to use network monitoring and analysis software for diagnosing connectivity issues or traffic accounting.

References: https://www.tamos.com/htmlhelp/monitoring/