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.
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.
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.
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.