Google+ invite lands man in jail

It's not the court's job to favour the person who asked for the restraining order, beyond issuing it in the first place and enforcing it afterwards. Enforcement is a matter of justice, not a matter of taking sides, and if the person accused of breaking the restraining order did not wilfully do so then a punishment would, in my view, be unjust.

Since we're at risk of talking past each other, my context here is that I often seem to receive email from LinkedIn, Twitter, Google etc. reminding me that people those services believe to be my friends have performed some activity or other, and they're just desperate for me to join them. In some cases I barely know these people beyond having had some interaction with them in the past which the social network never manages to forget, or they actually are friends who would be perfectly capable of telling me about the service in question directly and would never spam me in such an obvious way. Ergo I can conclude that these emails do not result from some intentional action on the part of the individuals named in them, even though the social network in question very much wants me to believe that they do (as I am deemed to be more likely to open and respond to the mail if I believe this). A common pattern is to send out mails along the lines of "You haven't spoken to X much recently, they miss you!" in an effort to get you to log in to the network again, which is obviously pretty fucking terrible in the case of a restraining order. There are a bunch of examples of this kind of thing here: http://microformats.org/wiki/social_network_anti-patterns

So, my prior experience would appear to corroborate the version of events given in the OP, viz. social networks sending mails which claim to be from individuals who have no knowledge of the mails themselves. Obviously this creates a nasty legal situation - Google cannot have violated the restraining order because they were never under a restraining order in the first place, but then it seems unjust to say that the alleged violator did so either, because he did not actually send the offending mail or even know of its existence. I suppose the matter hinges on whether or not he could or should have known, and in that case whether he could have done anything about it. It's also problematic in other ways. Say you were to take out a restraining order against me, such that I am no longer allowed to reply to your comments on HN or seek to engage you in any way, and I comply. At some future point HN decides to start sending out spam mails to get people to post more often, and you receive one implying that I, having not spoken to you for some time, wish to engage you in discussion (say, using the conversation we're having right now as evidence of the fact that we've enjoyed interesting discussions in the past). Would that violate the order? My instinct says not, especially as I could never have known the consequences when conducting this conversation, just as I could not know the consequences (viz. spam emails) when adding someone to my Gmail contact list.

I'm not sure where, you looked, but the best collection of CDC reports I could find are here: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolenc...

In particular, from the key findings sections of the report from the National Violence Against Women Survey:

"Women experience more intimate partner violence than do men: 22.1 percent of sur- veyed women, compared with 7.4 percent of surveyed men, reported they were physi- cally assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, or date in their lifetime; 1.3 per- cent of surveyed women and 0.9 percent of surveyed men reported experiencing such violence in the previous 12 months. Ap- proximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States." [1]

[1] https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf, page 6 under Key Findings

Further, women are more likely to be murdered by their partners than men. Safe Horizon's has a basic fact sheet that is pulled from sources at the bottom of the page: http://www.safehorizon.org/index/what-we-do-2/domestic-viole...

Uh... well...

Consider Google's propensity for certain dark patterns that feel like a kissing cousin to click-jacking.

The plausible deniability applicable to this situation goes something like this.

Guy has a Google e-mail address, but not a Google+ profile. Then he pops on over to YouTube, and wants to comment on some HILARIOUS kitten video...

BUT WAIT! In order to do that...

  1. Set up your channel and begin commenting on YouTube
     What you'll get: [
        "A YouTube channel", 
        "A Google+ profile"
     ]  

  2. > Continue to comment >

  3. Join Google+ by creating your public profile
     
     Enter Profile Data > Upgrade >

  4. Add People > Add All

Using this "Add All" option, absent-mindedly, will of course snarf you're entire address book. Everyone you've ever chatted with, or e-mailed. That list can be quite huge.

So there's a window of reasonable doubt that this COULD have been an innocent mistake. But now, that innocent mistake might mean the difference between an arrest, a night in jail, bail, a misdemeanor conviction, community service, and the difference between being able to truthfully answer "No" to the question "Have you ever been convicted of a 'crime'" on an employment application.

How believable is it that a jilted ex-boyfriend might coincidentally make such a mistake, just as a restraining order was invoked upon him? Well, consider the very recent change that requires a Google+ account to comment on YouTube [0]. A requirement that wasn't necessary in the past? Anyway, too late to hypothesize about that now.

Put 12 random strangers in a room, call it a jury, and find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6695935

My issue with the previous comment was with the wording that made it seem that restraining orders are unfair in general. If we want to talk about generalities and how we percieve the situation then we can't escape discussing how and if women and men are advantaged in society, and that's why I brought it up. We can't generalize based solely on the case of the Google+ invite.

> over someone that did nothing to cause you to have the disadvantage initially Disadvantages only exist in relation to others' advantages. Being in danger is a disadvantage, and threatening someone is an advantage. I understand that this is not just a question of gender, but that it's also related to the current conditions in the US that I only read about from afar (high gun posession and violence, relationship between police and citizens, mass incarceration and police brutality...) I don't know the situation, but saying women exploit restraining orders just smelled fishy.

BTW: http://storify.com/joliss/what-happens-when-our-software-has...