

Man Jailed for Gmail Invite to Ex-Girlfriend - vellum
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/google-invitation-sends-man-jail/story?id=21481276

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dty
Previous submission and front page discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7029596](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7029596)

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ColinWright
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?

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

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Ygg2
Or just a site that you enter court case number and track it?

No need for the drama.

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

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philosophus
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.

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yardie
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.

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hamburglar
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.

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DanielStraight
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.

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JimmaDaRustla
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.

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DanielStraight
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.

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JimmaDaRustla
Absolutely. (11 days late)

