Man Jailed for Gmail Invite to Ex-Girlfriend | Hacker News Reader

Man Jailed for Gmail Invite to Ex-Girlfriend

abcnews.go.com

26 pointsvellum20 comments

Previous submission and front page discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7029596

I'd be interested to see how this pans out, but, as with all these stories, I have no doubt that it will disappear, never to be seen again.

Are there facilities for monitoring remotely the progress of cases like this?

Like a social network for lawyers to post updates of their cases? When will lawyers start tweeting from the courtroom?

Or just a site that you enter court case number and track it?

No need for the drama.

Who would keep such a site up to date? How would the validity of the information be checked?

The courts, that's their job. If you can find out what court it's in and the case number, you can request the documents, they're public records.

There is a german lawyer blogging about his experiences on lawblog.de, but aside from him I never saw any lawyer/judge/etc. on the internet talking about their job.

In the UK: https://twitter.com/JackofKent

That's because they'll settle out of court.

Settle? Ignoring the absurdness of this, how would you settle this? I mean, who would settle with who? He (supposedly) broke restraining order.

Sorry, I implied that the man will sue Google, and they will settle out of court.

"I'll do one hour of community service." "Plea accepted."

Not an option. This is a criminal charge, not a lawsuit.

Well, those are still usually settled.

I signed on to Google+ right after it was made available and this is one of the reasons I don't use it now. It was proposing people I hadn't spoken to or had no real relationship with (that guy I bought the couch from on Craigslist in 2004). And sending them emails.

A similar offender is LinkedIn, but I tolerate them because you never know when someone will reach out with a job offer.

Agreed. I've had Google plus "invite" people on my behalf without warning and I find it pretty creepy and annoying. I am not under the misapprehension that I have any legal cause against Google for this, but it definitely makes me completely uninterested in actually using Google plus. I initially thought it mightmake a good facebook replacement but they have completely screwed up enough aspects of it that I just can't imagine it ever succeeding.

A few notes:

1. Stories like this are in the news because they're extraordinary. Stuff that happens every day isn't in the news, because... it's not news. There are 300 million people in the U.S. Occasionally weird things like this are inevitable.

2. These stories almost always have simple explanations: In this case, a restraining order. If you aren't supposed to contact someone, you aren't supposed to contact them. Your problem if you don't know how keep your email provider from emailing them, not the court's problem. Do you think a judge would accept "I don't know another route" as an explanation if he kept driving by her house?

3. There is nothing to discuss or learn from this kind of story. Something happened that seems odd at first glance and is tangentially related to tech. That's all this is. This isn't a new policy of jailing people for sending invites. It isn't indicative of a new trend. It's just something that happened and seems odd. As far as I can tell, it's exactly the correct response to a restraining order violation.

The story here is that the e-mail was sent without any action on his part - much different than driving by her house.

Google shouldn't be sending out invitations without an action from the user.

That's one side of the story. We have no way of knowing if it's true. It's not especially hard to accidentally click an invite link and not realize or remember you did it.

Absolutely. (11 days late)

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