Not seeing what the problem is here. The question of whether he actually did attempt to contact her is a fact-based one for the courts...
Similarly, if the woman receives a phone call with heavy breathing from the man's home phone number, it's certainly possible that he didn't do it: perhaps someone broke into his house and called her. He can certainly argue that in court.
Bjarne Stroustrup has a great quote which is something like (from memory, so I don't guarantee complete accuracy) "I used to want a computer which was as easy to use as a telephone. I got my wish; I now no longer know how to use my telephone".
The problem is that software (and social networking software in particular) is designed to take advantage of general unfamiliarity / cluelessness and manipulate people into doing something they didn't actually intend to do. The case is legally interesting for two reasons:
1. As DanBC pointed out above, when you have a restraining order against you, you are expected to take reasonable precaution not to violate it inadvertently. However, accidentally running into your ex in the grocery store is not in itself a violation -- so long as you do not then proceed to intentionally violate the order. Could an inadvertent social networking invitation constitute a violation due to lack of reasonable precaution, or it it more like the grocery store scenario?
2. The argument from ignorance. Computer systems are frequently regarded by laypeople as being not just unknown but unknowable. Can it be successfully argued that this crazy computer stuff is just too complicated and that a reasonable person could not take adequate precaution against the whims of an unknowable computer system.
This is the adult, 21st-century version of "the dog ate my homework" -- "Google violated my restraining order". Should it go to court? Absolutely. But it's still of great interest to the HN crowd because -- depending on the technical understanding of the judge and the type of argument chosen by the counsel -- it could end up impacting the design of web services and the sort of legal arguments we see decades into the future.
Usual disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, anything I say about legal matters is probably wrong, if restraining order lasts for more than four hours consult a physician, etc.
> Computer systems are frequently regarded by laypeople as being not just unknown but unknowable
In this case, it's not just the laypeople - it's even worse. This particular system is entirely under the control of a third party, so it's behavior is unpredictable to everybody.
I'll raise you one more: the system is self-learning, to the point that Google engineers themselves don't understand how it reaches the results it does.
Google engineers don't understand how their "deep learning" computer systems have gotten so good
Google no longer understands how its "deep learning" decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos.
This means the internet giant may need fewer experts in future as it can instead rely on its semi-autonomous, semi-smart machines to solve problems all on their own.
The claims were made at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco on Friday by Google software engineer Quoc V. Le in a talk in which he outlined some of the ways the content-slurper is putting "deep learning" systems to work.
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.
The problem is that the order of events is sometimes:
Person a: "i swear in court under penalties that person B poses a risk of harm to me and I want the court to prevent access"
Judge "person b must not contact person a at all. This is a temporary order until we get a full hearing. Serve the papers so that person b knows about this because their not here for this meeting."
Person b: "my life sucks. I need some friends to support me. I'll join this social network", clicky clicky friend request sent to everyone in person b's list
Papers served
Person b: well, fair enough, i wont contact them.
Police: arrest.
Sadly this is yet another topic being distorted by deranged MRAs.
>clicky clicky friend request sent to everyone in person b's list
The person with the restraining order has the responsibly to remove that person from their lists. Email, phone, etc, so they don't accidentally press a wrong button, butt dial, etc. I know once or twice I dialed the wrong contact. They also have the responsibility to drive a different way home so they don't go by their house. They didn't take the proper precautions.
It is a shame that the law doesn't distinguish between people maliciously breaking the order and people who because of stress and distress forget to remove all old. Ontacts from all old lists and accidentally sends, via an automated service, a boiler plate message.
Wait, so you think putting a person in jail for accidentally forgetting to uncheck a "Send requests to all my contacts" box is a perfectly reasonable thing, and the MRAs are deranged?
I think you need to empathize more with people who are not as familiar with the web as you are. Spotting dark patterns in webapps and avoiding them is a far, far more difficult thing than, for example, not accidentally pressing a speed dial button. Judges should take cognizance of this fact and not treat these actions as "contact".
Perhaps you didn't read it yet, but i have already said that there should perhaps be a single exemption for auto generated boiler plate text.
But still, breaking a court order is never a good idea. Saying that you broke it inadvertantly isn't enough. The court order is a clear bright line and you're expected to take special measures to avoid breaking the order.
If you want me to have any sympathy you'd need to find numbers of people caught by this, broken down by temporary and full orders, and by consequences (police chat, arrest and chat, arrest and prosecution, arrest and prosecution and punishment, arrest and prosecution and jail).
I've heard of a few instances of people getting into trouble after this kind of auto contact. Either it's rare enough to not be a problem, or it's so common that it isn't reported. I'd agree that if it was happening to tens of people a year that it would be too many.
Finally, use of prison for people who do not have a history of violence is not suitable, so i only support it if it's only a week or so.
I think that if it was your money paying for a lawyer you'd see the problem more readily.
The way you described the legal process is accurate: have a trial, having findings of fact. The thing people forget is that the process of being arrested, posting bail, paying for and going through the legal system, and putting one's life on hold for a period of time, is often more punishment than the fine or sentence under consideration.
This is why prosecutorial discretion and police discretion are important. When they are abused people suffer. And, sadly the accused have no voice at that stage of the process.
> Similarly, if the woman receives a phone call with heavy breathing from the man's home phone number, it's certainly possible that he didn't do it: perhaps someone broke into his house and called her. He can certainly argue that in court.
And all he has to do to win is raise reasonable doubt. Get a friend to say "I did it as a prank, and he told me not to." No restraining order violated.
Sure, but you've have to prove it in court. The criminal justice system is used to sorting out claimed alibi's. I'm doubtful you have discovered some novel hack to the justice system.
> And all he has to do to win is raise reasonable doubt. Get a friend to say "I did it as a prank, and he told me not to." No restraining order violated.
The trier of fact -- jury in a jury trial, judge in a bench trial -- is free (expected, even) to assess the credibility of evidence, including witness testimony. The fact that you get a witness to claim an alternative explanation to one that can be inferred from the prosecutions evidence does not, in and of itself, necessarily equate to reasonable doubt.
This is true, of course, and the prosecution will try to impeach the witness. But testimony without a significant reason to disbelieve I would think would be reasonable doubt if I was on a jury.
I think that's the legal equivalent of your mom saying "of course he couldn't have committed that murder, he was with me that night, we were watching Netflix."
I watch American tv shows and movies and am well aware of restraining orders but thought it was something very rare and almost never happens; now I read this. Is it that normal to get one 'after a breakup'? I have never heard anything like that in my country except for hardcore, life threatening criminal situations. Is it that easy to get one there and you actually get rounded up and hauled to a cell for violating while you are just 'contacting'?
If it sounds unlikely, then there's probably more to the story. We don't know what happened between them that caused a judge to believe the order to be necessary, but I presume that such orders are not given lightly.
They are given lightly. For example, a woman in Santa Fe got a restraining order after a "breakup" with David Letterman. He was ordered to stop communicating with her via code words on his show. Kelsey Grammar was also involved somehow.
Assume that a restraining order represents someone's strongly held desire to get a restraining order. That's the limiting factor. It's much closer to "X was sued" (Y filed some paperwork) than "X was found guilty of a criminal offense."
Well I presume that as well; I hope someone here has experience with that and can tell how hard it is? Because I just had that 'wow!' experience ; it feels like they hand them out at the police station to anyone asking :) I know they are not, but some 'actual', non media enlarged information would be great!
IIRC the process is something like this (disclaimer, this is secondhand from listening to lawyers and I have no experience with the process):
1. Alleged victim goes to judge, gets temporary restraining order on essentially no evidence. This is supposed to be a stop-gap while further process is going on.
2. Alleged perpetrator is notified and a court date set to discuss whether the restraining order is appropriate.
Temporary restraining orders really require nothing more than an allegation to get. The idea is that if the situation is life-threatening, you don't want to wait for evidence, but they are also supposed to be temporary. Longer-term restraining orders are supposed to require evidence and an actual adversarial process.
The article does not say what sort of restraining order was at issue.
Imagine a person who is likely to kill/harm you in a fit of passion.
If the harasser could get carried away in an argument and start beating, but didn't leave the house planning to kill, then restraining orders can limit the time the harasser is around you and limit the time before they 'blow their cool'. When the harasser breaks the restraining order and comes near you "just to talk, I promise", you can get the police involved straight away, and the harasser can be hauled off before they lose their cool, and things escalate.
So you get a restraining order and when they approach you just to talk anyway and you call the cops to come arrest them because they were not following the restraining order then they go into the same murderous rage. I am really not seeing how it is helpful, it would be illegal for them to harass you anyway.
Generally (yes there are cases of abuse-of-the-system) these temporary restraining orders are the result of domestic violence situations. The abuser is given a restraining order, and in conjunction the police provide some extra level of protection if it is a case of "(s)he may come back". It is a legal way of allowing the police to diffuse a situation before it gets worse - because there would otherwise be no good way to stop an offender from doing it again until an assault is in progress. It's a relatively effective way of the legal system saying "look, you got us involved, now we are requiring you to take a few days to calm down, and we'll deal with it after cooler heads are present".
In some places, restraining orders can be a barrier to things like purchasing a gun. But generally speaking, restraining orders alone aren't enough to prevent life-threatening situations.
Are there any jurisdictions where it is a barrier to, say, purchasing a knife? I doubt it. Again, if I thought my life was in danger, a restraining order would not be sought.
Oh I agree with you. If I thought someone might actually try to kill me (not just hurt me), a restraining order is the last thing I would get. I'd go into hiding instead. But I understand that to be the theory.
This person knows where you live, where you work, who all your friends are, your family.
Yeah, right. You are expected to quit your job, take your kids out of school (who are possibly also his kids), move hundreds of miles away, and possibly still not get away because they are following you around. On a whim. Oh, and never contact your friends and family again, they can be watching.
a restraining order is the last thing I would get. I'd go into hiding instead
Not an option for some people. You need savings and cash while hiding. What if you have children, can you just pull them out of school (say), while you hide? How long would you hide for? 5 years?
No necessarily, the custody issues might be solved. e.g. what if a couple (with kids) break up due to the husband beating the wife and kids. Father gets no custody and there is a restraining order to prevent him contacting them (y'know so he doesn't beat them again).
I'm confused as to why you are under the impression that restraining orders are 'normal', or that they hand them out to anyone asking, based on a single data point of one person getting one restraining order?
There are 2 to 3 million of them handed out each year [1].
If not "normal," that's certainly _common_. There is no proof or evidence required to issue one. The judge only reads a description of events. It is not required for the restrained party to be there to defend or present counter-evidence.
It's simply a 5-10 minute meeting between a judge and a person who alleges "fear" or "emotional harm." Exact laws vary from state to state.
They are free to file and cost 5-10 thousand dollars to appeal.
The 2-3 million figure is based on an _estimate_ by http://www.mediaradar.org/ and http://www.acfc.org/, which are not neutral sources (though this does not mean that they are wrong). The one clear piece of evidence cited is ~38,000 orders for Pennsylvania, which comprises 4% of the US population.
Edit: My initial comment understated the issue. Media Radar states that women are twice as likely to engage in unidirectional (unreciprocated) violence towards their partners are men. While domestic violence against men is real and subject to a lot of shame and silence, this estimate seems insane: I have previously seen figures like 10% of domestic violence stemming from women.
Right you are talking about a temporary restraining orders, right? For a full fledged restraining order there is at least supposed to be a showing of evidence and an opportunity to rebut the evidence on the part of the other party, right? The article you link to seems to lump these together with no real discussion of the process.
The idea behind a lax standard for TRO's is that if there is danger, the court should temporarily try to mitigate it, pending further process.
That was my whole reason for asking; they seem common because of the media. Now that I see other comments here it seems really easy to get them which seems like something open to abuse. I am just surprised because they are so uncommon here.
Probably varies from state to state. I once had a temporary restraining order served on someone based on nothing but my say so. I went to a judge with my lawyer, and the other party wasn't there and knew nothing about it until they were served.
To an outside observer it probably looked pretty mundane, but inside the little circle of conflict there were real dangers and the judge went with caution.
It is kind of telling that people seem to have become inured enough to the extremely anti-male nature of such laws in the US that they are seriously discussing whether or not sending a man to jail over sending a Google+ invite to a woman is okay or not, saying "it depends upon the circumstances" and whatnot.
Are you kidding me? Seriously, seeing "You got a Google+ invite from X" can cause you so much mental harm that you have to send another human being to jail? In a sane world, this would invite investigation for possible human rights violations. As it goes in the USA today, apparently people are shrugging their shoulders and saying "Well, you know, he did send her a Google+ invite..."
Thank you. I'm also appalled by the complete lack of empathy and the bitter pragmatism here.
If you're going to participate in social media, there's certain rules of etiquette and responsibilities to follow (not like anyone does, but anyway). Large companies will resort to malicious and unethical features in order to gain advantages. Fact of life. You would think our interconnected society would be aware of this, but I guess it's beyond the average consumer of social media.
The courts told him "no contact". This wasn't some frivilous law suit of "emotional harm", this was a judge saying "If you do this, you'll go to jail", and the person did the thing.
If courts can send you to jail for sending a service invite to someone (something that might easily be done by accident and completely unintentionally -- think LinkedIn's dark pattern for inviting friends), then people should be outraged by that.
Once upon a time, courts also used to send you to jail for marrying a person from a different race. That does not mean you should accept that decision unquestioningly.
Agreed that if Google automatically sent the invite then that means that the accused didn't send it, and hence didn't break the law. However we don't know, in this case, if that's the case. If he did sent the invite, then he broke the order
Again, in several regimes, "court orders" have been served that are accepted as being human rights violations today. You don't accept a ruling as being correct just because it is a court order (not going any further to avoid invoking Godwin's Law.)
You either obey the court order while you appeal it and fight the injustice. Or you disobey the court order and go to jail and appeal the court order and fight the injustice.
But while the order stands it will be enforced by the apperatus of the law.
(IANAL) Restraining orders are usually granted without requiring any evidence, aside from the testimony of the person requesting it. I believe it is a common strategy for (especially) women to exploit this in order to gain some sort of advantage over their partners following a breakup.
There's a distinction in many jurisdictions between a temporary order (granted as a matter of course on prima facie statement of the requester) and a permanent order, which generally requires a hearing and evidence from both parties (though if only one shows, the order is generally granted base on preponderance of evidence).
ROs suffer from a number of deficiencies: if someone's really bent on doing harm, they can be grossly ineffective. And in some cases (particularly child custody, though also other divorce proceedings, as well as immigration situations due to provisions of VAWA), ROs can be grossly misused to attempt to gain benefits not otherwise available.
Typically a TRO should have a hearing within a few weeks, however this isn't always the case (particularly in more complicated situations), so "temporary" may be an extended period of time.
Orders are rarely granted reciprocally, that is, as mutual stay-away orders, though these are granted in some cases. A unilateral order turns what are otherwise lawful actions into criminal ones (usually misdemeanors, but not always). The requesting party may use the order to trap the restrained party, particularly as forms of indirect contact (as described in this story) may be construed as violations of the order.
You can find a great deal of discussion on this specific aspect of restraining orders from abuse / shelter sites and services themselves. The recommendation from many of these is to put yet more teeth into the orders.
The question isn't "do the orders do some good?", but "is this the best possible means to achieve the goals desired?" And in this I think the answer is "no".
That dismisses the collateral damage: orders are easy to obtain, can themselves be wielded as weapons, and are seen as part of the "getting even with" aspect of many failed relationships.
Truth is, relationship are messy, tangled, and deep. And when you put the law in the way of people doing what they do, the picture gets messier, not cleaner. When I was researching a couple of points for my comments above, I ran across the following link concerning reciprocal orders:
I got a restraining order on my soon-to-be ex about three weeks ago for him constantly harassing me. We were married 11 years, have three kids, and he has always been an emotional abuser to us.
Anyway, I was served with a temporary restraining order last night, which claimed the same things in his application, as mine. He wrote humiliating lies and twisted truths saying how I have always been the abuser, etc. I am sick because it's not true, and once again he is mirroring his abuse, onto me. I can't even believe the judge signed it, and if I was so awful, why didn't he say so during our interim parenting plan hearing? I just want to move on, and I have full custody (except for one day a week) so I want to know if anyone else has dealt with something similar?
The point is: the judge in issuing an order against her was applying precisely the same legal basis for doing so: an ex-parte order based on prima facie evidence. Or for those not versed in Latin: an order issued without notice to or testimony from the restrained, based on the presumption of validity of the statements of the petitioner.
I actually see some strong merits to this, and believe that reciprocal orders as a matter of course make quite a bit of sense. The objective isn't to punish but to secure the safety of the parties involved.
The response of the attorney in that thread is on point:
Meanwhile, what's the big deal? The restraining order says you can't contact him, which I'm sure you don't want to do anyway. So let it go and have your say in court. I'm not saying don't fight it, I'm just saying don't let it bother you.
The fact that in many jurisdictions there's also an unequal balance of costs in filing and fighting claims (a petitioner may request legal and other fees from the restrained, but not vice versa), there is even more potential for abuse.
It also suggests to me that a system under which the entire process is made far less adversarial, and in which a better system of shelters and resettlement is provided for, might be, on balance, a far more effective system. Again: the goal is to secure safety, not to punish. If there is actual violence or threats of violence, there are legal means to pursue these (and the order might stand as a sign of prior notice and concern).
A significant problem with "no contact" as it's construed, which can include 2nd-hand commentary from mutual acquaintances, or, as in the possible case of the G+ incident referenced, automated notifications through third-party electronic services, is that for someone unjustly restrained it makes the process of investigating the case very much more difficult.
And the costs are real. $2000 is a good low-order estimate of what a lawyer's retainer will require. If you're looking at a family / domestic situation, odds are that your family law attorney isn't versed in criminal law, which is where the order will land you. For something like this to explode to legal and incidental costs of $10k - $100k isn't unusual, and that's just the direct costs to the individuals, exclusive of court, police, service, and other costs. Which are merited for legitimate uses, but somewhat less so where abused.
> I believe it is a common strategy for (especially) women to exploit this in order to gain some sort of advantage over their partners following a breakup.
Perhaps the reason why women seek TROs and ROs is because they are much more likely then men to be the victim of physical assault, stalking, harassment, or murder from their partners or former partners.
> they are much more likely then men to be the victim
That's the common belief. How do we know it's true, and not a "just so" story?
My investigations into this led me to CDC reports (and others) showing that DV / IPV was largely 50/50. Harm was more often done to the smaller partner (i.e. women). But women also tended to use more weapons in their attacks.
These reports aren't hard to find. Most people don't look.
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]
Rather than look at all cases of "harm", look at the serious cases, like murder, or harm requiring a hospital visit/stitches/broken bones/etc. What's the split then?
Each year, more than one million people in the United States
obtain restraining orders for intimate partner rape, physical
assault, or stalking (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). An estimated
18.9% of the more than 5 million U.S. women and 4.3% of the more
than 3 million U.S. men who are physically abused, raped, or
stalked by an intimate partner each year seek and are granted a
restraining order.
This is very good info. This highlights that the notion that men or women getting restraining orders to get back at a former partner isn't the primary motivation for getting a TRO or RO like the parent claimed.
"A common strategy" and "the primary motivation" aren't the same thing. The revenge / inconvenience / embarrassment / cost factor does come into play, however.
> Perhaps the reason why women seek TROs and ROs is because they are much more likely then men to be the victim of physical assault, stalking, harassment, or murder from their partners or former partners.
Whether or not that is the case, it is also possible that it is more that when they are (or, in the case of murder, expect to be) the victims of such things, they feel they don't have other effective remedies outside the legal system, whereas men feel more able to respond effectively (whether or not legally) with physical violence.
This goes both ways. When I (a man) was the target of some really pretty severe domestic violence (I was threatened with a knife, attacked with blunt objects and more several times a week), the reason why I eventually decided (quite deliberatively) to respond with physical force was that I looked at what my options were in the legal system and realized I didn't have any, that if I called the cops, they'd probably arrest me, not her. So I hit back with very measured force (except one time she hit me from behind with a blunt object and I hit back with full force once out of fear she might have knife in her other hand). Given the scale of what I was going through I don't think anyone would claim it wasn't self-defence.
So these things to some extent perpetuate eachother.
I would word it differently: "for women to use this in order to regain some sort of advantage" considering the fact that women generally are at a strong disadvantage in society (especially when it comes to personal safety and income)
I don't want to discuss how and if women or men are disadvantaged by the society, but don't you think that gaining an unfair advantage over someone that did nothing to cause you to have the disadvantage initially doesn't really solve the problem?
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.
The problem here doesn't seem to be the restraining order itself, it seems to be -- if the description of how the invite in question could have been generated is correct -- that the police made an arrest without anything approaching probable cause to suspect that the arrestee had done anything prohibited by the order or otherwise criminal.
>I believe it is a common strategy for (especially) women to exploit this in order to gain some sort of advantage over their partners following a breakup.
The available information about restrained persons typically
has been documented within the context of assessing the efficacy
of restraining orders that were issued because of domestic violence. A random sample of 200 defendants in domestic violence or
civil protection orders in San Diego during a 10-week period in
1990 (Meloy et al., 1997) indicates that most (72%) were men, and
that the average age was 38 years (range 15 to 70 years). Caucasians
predominated (57%), but there were substantial proportions of Blacks (22.5%) and Hispanics (17.5%) as well; ethnicity
was unknown for 3% of the defendants. (Whether any of these
groups were disproportionately represented is unknown; rates
were not calculated.) A total of 11% had at least one contact with
the county’s mental health services agency. A study of all 663 men
against whom civil protection orders were granted in Quincy,
Massachusetts (Klein, 1996), also in 1990, found an average age of
33 years (range 17 to 70 years) for the defendants. Half (49.5%)
were not married, 46.6% were married, and 3.9% were formerly
married. Almost 80% of the defendants had a prior criminal
record within the state; more than half (54%) had at least one prior
record for an alcohol or drug crime, usually drunk driving.
Information on defendant ethnicity was not reported.
The primary, albeit not the sole, focus of the present research is
the person to be restrained. Such information can help increase
the effectiveness of violence prevention efforts, which is not a
small consideration given the history of violence among
restrained persons—about three fourths of men against whom
restraining orders are issued have prior criminal records (Isaac,
Cochran, Brown, & Adam, 1994; Klein, 1996), and nearly half
have committed a violent crime (Isaac et al., 1994).
Results indicate
that about one fifth of the restraining orders are to restrain someone of the same gender as the protected person. It is not possible
to ascertain with the available data whether these cases represent
violence in gay and lesbian relationships or heterosexual pairings
gone awry (e.g., to order the former male partner of a woman to
stay away from her current male partner) or an unrealized relationship, as is often the situation in cases of stalking. Further
research is needed to address the nature of same- and opposite-
sex pairings in restraining orders.
That's quite a substantial amount of information posted, however, none of it appears to be relevant to the point in the GP comment.
I would also like to observe that if there are on the order of 1 restraining order in effect at a given time for every 100 members of the population (assuming the source article is correct), then, well, that's a lot of restraining orders.
But if the person is threatening your life, it makes no sense to get a restraining order.
"Yes, I know you want to kill me, so don't contact me, don't come near my home at such and such address, or my work at such and such address, or you will be guilty of a minor misdemeanor!" Right.... that's a good idea...
Without a restraining order, it is much harder to get the police to respond to harassing or stalking behaviors from someone. The restraining order certainly wouldn't be enough in a life-threatening situation, but it is one tool.
It makes perfect sense if the person is likely to kill/harm you in a fit of passion.
If the harasser could get carried away in an argument and start beating, but didn't leave the house planning to kill, then restraining orders can limit the time the harasser is around you and limit the time before they 'blow their cool'. When the harasser breaks the restraining order and comes near you "just to talk, I promise", you can get the police involved straight away, and the harasser can be hauled off before they lose their cool.
It's true that it isn't nearly as effective as you'd hope but it does help enhance your ability to get the police quickly involved, establish a paper trail, etc.
>If someone is out to kill you, go hide with relatives, some ways not too close.
Define not too close. My closest relatives are over 200 miles away. Am I expected to quit my job? Take my children (If I had them) out of school? For how long?
This person may know exactly who all your relatives are and where they live, thus know exactly where to find you anyways.
I think the real answer is "don't take advice from HN". I know someone who moved halfway across the country to avoid domestic violence. Sometimes it is an answer. It shouldn't ever need to be, but in reality, it's sometimes the only option a woman has available.
Fair enough for that literal description, meaning that the parent poster was sloppy. But at some point between an unfriendly breakup and literal threats of murder, the restraining order is the right response. I think that's the key point.
If you are served a restraining order, you almost always already know these locations. If you don't know these locations, there is almost no reason to serve a restraining order.
Some of the people replying here clearly have no experience with stalking or domestic violence... They are much more scary than you can imagine.
We share that language; I didn't know the word, but it seems to be omgangs/contact verbod. And no, I rarely hear them being used; there was one for some Amsterdam gangster and the partner who betrayed him, but that makes sense.
I have a friend who works the emergency telephone line and is getting increasingly frustrated with calls regarding Facebook. A typical call will have the caller complain that, "[person x] has written something horrible on my wall!" So he says, "hang on? They've written on your wall? So you're friends with them?! Just un-friend them!"
In fact in a recent review he was told off for groaning loudly on the telephone when someone mentioned Facebook.
However, you can see that if Google+ continues with it's desperate push for market share like this, there will be more and more instances like that in the article. People really won't know how to properly eliminate others from the online social lives, as easily as just "un-friending" them.
G+ did nothing out of the ordinary here (if indeed it did anything, there is plenty of guess work in that post) Facebook friending and Twitter following have landed many a person in jail, none of these services got this sort of blame for it.
When adding someone to your circle they get an email notification, same as when you follow someone on Twitter they get an email telling them that, But suddenly in G+ it's 'aggressive'?! sensationalism and blaming one service for something that is done by all and is mainly innocuous is bad form.
And for the record G+ doesn't bulk send invites to all your contacts that just misinformation and FUD spreading.
I haven't consciously used G+ in a long time, yet people still occasionally get emails about me "adding them back". It's a very strange system and since I have no idea wtf it does or how it works, it can't really be said I'm doing that. I just read emails and use docs, and occasionally chat with a handful of people.
Every time I go to google+, usually because of an email notification, i get redirected to an interstitial that helpfully wants to email all my gmail contacts to invite them to google+. Every time I go to google+ I'm one accidental button press away from annoying all my contacts.
Do we know if Google+ invites are sent deliberately? I think on Facebook you can prove who sent a friend request.
That said, being arrested for a friend-request is silly. She could just block/ban/reject the request and no harm done.
I would like to know the name of judge or prosecutor(?) who accepted a Google+ friend request as breach of restraining order. I get the very strong feeling that judges/prosecutors and lawyers loose common sense the minute they start practicing.
A restraining order means no contact, period. Life isn't kindergarten. Just because it's "online" doesn't mean that kindergarten rules apply. "No touching" doesn't mean "let's see if I can get away with just touching you with one pinky." A friend request, even if easily rejected, is definitely contact, as much as a text message or a phone call (which can also be blocked). The issue isn't how easy it is to block, it's whether the person under the restraining order tried to initiate contact with the person being protected by the restraining order.
You're right of course, but I struggle to view the world in such a black-and-white manner to be honest especially when there are black boxes like in play, Google+'s source code in this case.
How much proof would have to be provided that the Google+ invitation was sent deliberately by the user? Sworn testimony from a Google employee? There can of course exist bugs that send invites erroneously that nobody knows about. Revealing of the source code and analysis by experts? Unknown bugs can still exist, especially in systems as large as Google's.
Stepping back from this particular case, what about apps that scan your contact list and automatically send invites and/or messages?
These situations aside, it's far too easy to accidentally send an invitation. Hell, I don't doubt that many people reflexively agree to prompts on websites they think they're familiar with. Of course the argument can be made that people with restraining orders must be more careful, but it just doesn't seem sane to me that people can get jail time for clicking a button on a prompt that most people wouldn't think twice about.
When someone has taken a restraining order out you've lost your rights to shades of grey.
The order is designed to be black and white to provide clear, firm, boundaries over which you will not pass. Before the restraining order there are several levels of allowance which let people obey the spirit (no contact) or to experiment with boundaries.
When under a restraining order you need to take special steps to ensure complyance.
Say hypothetically you have a restraining order against you, and a company sends a piece of mail to your ex with your address as the return address and worded to look like it was from you. According to what you're saying, you'd be in the wrong because you didn't go through every company you've ever dealt with to tell them not to do that?
Because this is exactly what social media sites experiment with every day, they spoof their users or make it very confusing as to who exactly is sending correspondence and with email it's extremely easy to make it look like it came from the user when in fact they had no knowledge of this practice.
What are your thoughts on spammers spoofing you? Plenty phishing attempts happen this way, a spammer gets a hold of a mutual acquaintance's contact list, and sends email to one pretending to be another, without shades of grey you're saying that the spoofed individual should not be given some slack?
Did i do anything to trigger that company to send the mail?
Did I take that action after the order or not?
Because doing something when I'm married and forgetting to undo that after a restraining order is different to deliberately doing something after an order has been taken out.
If a spammer is spoofing my details I can demonstrate to the court that I had nothing to do with the sending of that spam. There's a reasonable point to be made about the burden of proof, i guess.
People who are spoofed did not send the contact.
Just checking but you do see the difference between:
Bob does nothing to contact Chris. But Sam Spammer sends an email to Chris using Bob's forged email details.
And
Bob joins a website. The website asks for access to Bob's email contacts, and offers to send emails to everyone on that list, and Bob says "go ahead".
When a judge tells you that you're going to jail if you break an order you either get ready to go to jail and break the order or you make efforts to not break the order. It is very normal to deal with i justice after the event by appealing at a pater date.
Sure, I agree that special steps should be taken, but in our age of automatic/transparent updates and data longevity I think we need to re-evaluate the immediate responses taken by law enforcement when restraining orders are violated.
It's not at all far-fetched for scenarios where apps automatically send messages to current/previous contacts without the user's consent (in fact we've seen this time and time again). Should the immediate response really be to jail the offender, especially if the process for proving intention one way or another can be long and arduous? Because if that's the case, what we're really asking is for people with restraining orders to become technology-shunning luddites since they can't guarantee the apps they use won't have mined their connections in the past, or that apps they've stopped using after the restraining order don't send messages on their behalf.
I agree that apps and aspects of modern life make it too easy for someone to appear to have broken an order even if they had no intent of doing so.
Perhaps some kind of pre-court mediation where the parties can apologies and explain and demonstrate willingness to abide by the order?
I kind of hope that headlines like "Facebook request sent me to prison" makes app authors think carefully about grabbing email address lists and sending to all of them.
Perhaps there could be a honeypot project where people include trap addresses on their contact lists?
> When someone has taken a restraining order out you've lost your rights to shades of grey.
Silly me. I thought proof beyond a reasonable doubt was still required. I would expect that it would only apply to knowing (or even deliberate) behavior.
Oh wait, due process was so 20th century....
You don't get to throw someone in jail for something that doesn't reach the "known or should have known" threshold in this case. Due notice and due process are still the law of the land.
Court orders are subject to due process. When you give software permission to access your email contact list, and then permission to send email to everyone on that lost, and you are under a court order that places restrictions on who you are allowed to contact, you don't the get to say "whoops! I didn't realise that all this contacting people stuff might be covered by the don't contact this person court order".
From a purely letter of the law interpretation, you're not wrong (at the moment). What you're missing (and the reason that you seem to have to respond again and again with this type of comment) is that we're in the middle of redefining what the word "contact" means, and that heavily influences the spirit of the law.
When restraining order laws were written, contacting someone took at least a modicum of effort. You had to write a letter, or type an email, or pick up the phone and dial a number, or take the time to travel to visit someone. It was a process that took premeditation. You simply couldn't contact someone with as little as a button press (that may or may not even make it explicitly clear who you're contacting). In fact, the law explicitly has exemptions for contact that was not premeditated, such as running into someone accidentally in public.
However now we've got systems that intentionally place people in contact because it increases revenue for the service running it. They've made it so easy to contact wide swaths of people in a completely impersonal manner that my cat could "contact" people on Facebook by walking across the keyboard.
So the real question people are asking is: does an automated online service sending an email with my name in it to a person constitute contacting that person. I'm not sure it does. By the general attitude in the thread, it seems a lot of people are also hesitant to call that contact.
So sure, you're right about this constituting contact in current law, but what we're seeing is that current law has not kept up with social perceptions of what people think of as contact. This means the law is probably going to change in the next decade or two. Hell, it might even change right now because of this case.
I should be hyperaware of anything around "contact" - this includes automatic systems.
There are not many systems that will access your contact list wihtout permission.
There are not many systems that will then send a contact to everyone on that list without permission.
So a person has to take several steps:
1) not remove X's contact details
2) allow access to contact list
2a) allow contact to happen
(2 and 2a are often bundled into on step).
This feels really clear to me. But perhaps we need to give a "single accidental blerate contact exemption" - this allows someone to male a mistake once, but not to abuse the system by joining dozens of networks to send many many requests.
It should be noted that the changing definition of contact isn't particulay new.
Bob is givi g a restraining order, so he starts shopping i. A new part of town. He doesn't know that Ann uas got a job there. He will be thought of as breaking the order until he. An explain that he had no way of knowing that Ann worked there.
I would still expect the state to have to prove that he actually sent the invite. They can do this easily enough, issuing a subpoena for a criminal case to Google under the stored communications act or a search warrant under the same act if it is necessary. If Google doesn't have records to show that a link was actually clicked on, or the records don't show that, no violation.
What if it was a spam email from a bot impersonating Google+? I occasionally scan my spam, and it doesn't seem out of the question. Once printed out, would you be sure that all judge/prosecutors would notice or want to notice? Restraining orders don't come out of the blue, but there is plenty of reason to avoid sending someone to jail because a no-content email contained their name.
I very much hope that someone in such a situation would be able to submit some evidence showing that it was not them that sent the message. Unfortunately, suing for wrongful arrest takes tome and money and might happen after the person has spent time in prison and lost jobs etc etc.
Do you know anything that can reduce the number of spouses being murdered or hospitalised by their spouse, and that could reduce the need for court procedures, and could reduce the miscarriages of justice, and that would cost less than the current system?
I'm not being facestious either. UK has removed legal aid for famy court proceedings and so people have to muddle through this with no legal representation. It takes ages and is weird and stupid.
No, a restraining order means whatever the restraining order says. A restraining order may or may not say "no contact, period" (and, in fact, it is unlikely to say "no contact, period", especially in the case of a TRO which is always issued in the context of a lawsuit between the parties, which necessarily requires contact by certain channels).
> A friend request, even if easily rejected, is definitely contact
A request to link accounts that isn't initiated by the person who is a subject of order, even if it is presented to the person who is protected by the order by an online service as an invitation to connect to the subject of the order cannot, OTOH, be a violation of the restraining order, as there is no act by the subject of the order involved.
Does this case clarify whether the Google+ invite was sent individually and deliberately, or as part of a mass "find friends" style feature and thus inadvertently?
I actually know jack-shit about Google+. I assumed what the article was talking about was like a Facebook friend request where you have to individually invite a specific person. Will Google+ really just randomly spam people you've had e-mail conversations with?
True, and furthermore, services like this (FB, G+, LI, etc.) have every incentive to escalate their involuntary contacts over time. Every once in a while they'll go too far too quickly and have to backtrack due to public outcry, but there won't be any outcry about the plight of alleged order-violators. In general you should expect every service that knows your name and any other person's contact info to send that person many messages on your behalf without your consent. It will be nice when the courts figure this out; I don't expect it to take them more than twenty years.
Eh, maybe. I can't really picture a law forbidding automated email that wouldn't have horrible consequences for most citizens. Perhaps the courts ought to just accept that the world changes and change along with it?
The world changes, but at the end of the day, unwanted, unsolicited contact is the same whether it's via e-mail, text message, phone call, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. The fact that technology makes it easier for companies like Facebook and Google to do stupid things like spam your contact list doesn't mean that courts should change unrelated rules as a result.
...unwanted, unsolicited contact is the same whether it's via...
You say that as if unsolicited communication is some kind of basic, elemental thing, like murder or robbery. In fact it is a deliberate exception to speech rights, which exception itself has plenty of exceptions. For instance, there doesn't seem to be much caselaw preventing junk mail, perhaps because that's the only thing keeping the USPS in operation. Keep in mind, too, that what courts may include in orders varies among jurisdictions.
One could certainly imagine a new law intended to encourage services that send automatic communications to be more careful about violating restraining orders. One could not imagine such a law actually succeeding in its stated purpose, nor could the imagination encompass such a law not having horrible follow-on effects. It's much more plausible to recall that courts may only use their injunction power to achieve equitable remedies, and that in a context of involuntary electronic messages there is nothing equitable about holding someone responsible for communications she did not create.
I don't think they randomly spam, but sometimes when you login to Google+ it will show you a large window of all your google contacts that are not in your circles with an easy way to invite all of them. It's easy to accidentally click the button to send invites just to close the window and it's also easy to not realize who all you sent them to.
...judges/prosecutors... [lose] common sense the minute they start practicing.
The system actually selects for the most vindictive, Procrustean, authoritarian candidates for these positions. So if you're an attorney with an ounce of decency or common sense, you don't even get the chance to "lose" that as a judge or prosecutor, because you never become one of those.
> That said, being arrested for a friend-request is silly. She could just block/ban/reject the request and no harm done.
There's no such thing as a "friend request" in G+. You can follow someone, which means you get to see their public posts. The other person will get a notification of that, but won't see anything you post.
Of course the other person can decide to follow you, and then you get to also see their non-public posts that they share with a circle you're in. And of course they get to see your posts (public and appropriate circles).
But even if people don't follow you, G+ can still suggest that you might want to follow them. And this being Google, that could probably be based on the fact that you emailed each other a lot 2 years ago.
So the big question here is: was it a notification that the restrainee followed the restrainer? Or was it Google inadvertently suggesting that the restrainer might want to follow the restrainee?
The article focuses mainly on whether the man did indeed send the Google+ invitation to his former girlfriend. It seems to me that the actual troubling question is whether sending a Google+ invitation can be considered a violation of a restraining order. The bar is far too low when receiving a single inconsequential message that you have full ability to ignore can be considered a form of harassment.
A restraining order is against any form of contact.
You (and I) don't know the circumstances that led to the restraining order. There may have been violence, intimidation, harassment, abuse. This may even form part of a consistent pattern of abuse.
The woman in this case may feel so traumatised by any reminder of her ex, or contact from him, that the act of receiving an email from him (on his behalf) may actually be deeply upsetting and disturbing. It may undo any efforts she has put in place to move on with her life, and restore her to the place of being abused.
If a court has put in place a restraining order then there is no acceptable basis for the ex to contact her. Including whether that contact is via an automated email on his behalf.
I'm with the v̶i̶c̶t̶i̶m̶ court on this. Someone is to blame, and the bar isn't too low. I do think that a decision like this will cause Google to evaluate the impact of any automated emails.
I also think that if you get a restraining order against you it's not enough to lazily avoid contact with the other person, you should proactively ensure that you do not contact the other person... so purge your address book if need be, the court has made it your responsibility to not contact the other person.
Maybe I don't understand correctly the legal terms but this:
You (and I) don't know the circumstances that led to the restraining order.
... doesn't seem to be very consistent with this:
I'm with the victim on this.
Isn't it possible for a court to issue mutual restraint orders? Or maybe the order is a preventive measure for alledged facts that are still to be evaluated.
We don't know what happened to motivate the order. We know who the victim is here: the guy that got jailed.
Also, I don't think it's very reasonable to expect most users to know how to purge personal information from sites, it's a recurring theme over here.
There is no "with the victim" here though. I mean, morally speaking, we are all with the victim - human decency alone demands that we have sympathy for their predicament, which is why we have things like restraining orders in the first place. But the enforcement of the order is done by the police and the state, and the state is in a position to imprison someone for an act which they did not commit, which seems to me to be unfair. If Google carries out automated actions on behalf of its users, without their knowledge or permission and in a way that they cannot reasonably predict or prevent, then it seems unjust to punish the user.
You can say that the person should have removed the victim from their contacts, but it's not even obvious that they would have known that the victim was on their contact list (basically, anyone you ever email gets added to it), and even if they did know, they would have no particular reason to assume that Google would contact this person automatically.
I side with the court (which is choosing to favour the person who asked for the restraining order).
It's not been proven that Google did send an automated email. The only thing the court does know is that an email was sent, and it was "from" the person who is subject to the restraining order.
If Google did send an automated email (which is unclear), then lawyers should be updating their advice to the subjects of restraining orders to ensure that their contact lists are purged appropriately.
> If Google did send an automated email (which is unclear), then lawyers should be updating their advice to the subjects of restraining orders to ensure that their contact lists are purged appropriately.
so basically you are saying that when something in the law is not clear, it's the job of the lawyers to make it sure they give proper advice to the next person coming into that situation, while the unlucky first person just has to face consequences?
> "so basically you are saying that when something in the law is not clear, it's the job of the lawyers to make it sure they give proper advice to the next person coming into that situation, while the unlucky first person just has to face consequences?"
That is a lawyer's job, yes.
On the other hand, it is also our Constitutional tradition to give the defendant generally the benefit of the doubt on the law (rule of lenity, reasonable doubt, and so forth).
You can't hold someone in violation of a law he or she could not have reasonably foreseen.
The question is where is the line drawn between contacting a person and a third party or script of some sort contacting the same person ostensibly on their behalf.
For another example a person working in telemarketing is usually given a list of numbers to call which are automatically dialed by the phone system so therefor has no direct control over who they "contact".
The usual standard for a court would be the intent of the alleged perpetrator (IANAL etc).
I would think it would be either "intentionally" or "knowingly." In other words if you sent the email intending to contact the other person that's pretty clearly there. I would suspect at least some states would draw the line at "knew or should have known" when you hit send.
But "couldn't reasonably have known" is different. If Google is, for example, looking at your past email contacts and sending invites out on your behalf then that is so far beyond "knew or should have known" that I can't imagine it applying.
If violating a restraining order is a misdemeanor or other crime, which it certainly is if bail is set, then the burden of proof goes the other way at trial (which we aren't at yet).
The state must prove he sent it (probably, I am assuming, knowingly --- I doubt that fat-fingering is enough given due process requirements), and they must prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
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 don't know if the bar is too low, since crimes have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Jailing someone here seems rather excessive though.
Keep in mind I find this no contact thing rather weird. Of course I spent most of my adult life in small towns in the US, where such a broad order would be met with "no contact? In a town of 3000 people? Are you saying he has to move out of town?"
I have also known people who were heavily threatened by exes and opted to just disappear for a while. The reason is that if you are really in danger, then the last thing you want is to tell the target of the order where to avoid (because that's where you will be). Due notice (a Constitutional requirement) makes restraining orders useless against someone dangerous enough.
> A restraining order is against any form of contact.
A restraining order has specific terms that address exactly what conduct it restrains. It may or may not be against any form of contact [1]. So the question is really, is the specific kind of conduct here within what was actually prohibited in the order (a secondary consideration, if it was, might be whether or not it should have been included in the order, but the remedy for that is to appeal the order, not to defy it and expect not to face consequences.)
[1] See, for instance, the the California template domestic violence restraining order, with check-off boxes for standard terms (including #21 -- which is completely free text) that may or may not be imposed in any particular order: http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/dv110.pdf
Even though I don't know the specifics, I take issue with the very idea that merely contacting someone can constitute harassment. At the very least, the content of the message should be taken into account. Intent, more than raw actions taken out of context, is what determines wrongdoing.
Note that I'm not suggesting that the actual law is being misinterpreted. I'm merely stating my personal views about the existence of such a law.
Merely contacting someone may violate the specific terms of a specific restraining order. Restraining orders very often, by design, restrain conduct that would not, absent the order, be prohibited by any law (they would generally be unnecessary if they didn't, since the law itself already restrains any conduct it prohibits.)
I disagree. A restraining order is precisely meant to bar all forms of communication so that we don't need to decide on a case-by-case basis which communications violate the order, which would lead to highly unequal enforcement with some people being punished for things that others are not punished for.
Perhaps I wasn't too clear in my original post. I was making a normative statement, not a positive one. In other words, I accept that the actual law may consider this a violation; I'm questioning whether the law itself is acceptable in those terms.
Then again, I don't live in the USA, and the concept of a restraining order is a bit alien to me since it's not something heard of as much over here. There surely is some cultural bias at play.
I don't think it's too much to ask for courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. Establishment of intent is one of the main things courts exist for.
I spent a few minutes reading up in restraining orders in Massachusetts (the state this happened in) and it doesn't look like contacting someone would even count as a violation!
Without knowing the details of the exact case behind the restraining order, it's hard to be certain the bar is set "far too low" as you assert. Set a hard bar like that, and many will simply see "I can get away with that!", and find as many such bars they can scrape under as possible - making up in volume what they lack in direct effect - or a line to slowly cross further and further when not nipped in the bud. This is, ultimately, why intent matters.
Sufficiently strong-willed people can ignore death threats as "inconsequential, empty bluster." However, this is neither necessarily wise, recommended, or easy, nor does it disqualify such threats as harassment.
While an invite is no death threat, I'd note there's another bar in play here too: The former girlfriend was, if we're to give her the benefit of the doubt, perturbed enough by this invitation to go down to the police station.
It seems reasonable to me that courts should be able to issue temporary restraining orders without requiring much evidence, as long as it's generally understood that that's what happened.
The problem here seems to be that the man was held accountable for a breach of such an order that was both minimal and unintentional. I would guess that the law takes this possibility into account, and the police involved probably should have rejected the woman's complaint as vexatious, if that was the entire basis of her complaint.
> It seems reasonable to me that courts should be able to issue temporary restraining orders without requiring much evidence, as long as it's generally understood that that's what happened.
The potential for abuse is high. The actual abuse is high.
"My partner hit me!" And he's out. The courts are required to have a hearing within 30 days. Call the court and ask for that, and you'll be laughed at. 6 months later, the accusation is dropped.
In the mean time you've lost your house, kids, and likely your job.
DoS attacks aren't limited to computers. When we make it easier to do something... we get more of that behavior. Both good and bad.
> The potential for abuse is high. The actual abuse is high.
And that is terrible, but I am not necessarily sure it is net terrible. To decide that, we would need to compare it with the terribleness of having no expedient legal recourse when you reasonably fear a partner might harass, assault or kill you. I've no doubt the implementation details suck though.
> we would need to compare it with the terribleness of having no expedient legal recourse ...
We largely have this data. Historically there were no TROs, and domestic violence was higher than it is today. However, there is no evidence that domestic violence is lower as a result of the "easy TRO" process. Instead, we see that incidence of all violent crimes have plunged in the past 30 years.
I would wager that domestic violence rates fell in conjunction with overall violence rates. And that TROs had little, if any, impact on them. This would mean that TROs are likely to be net negative, because they add a new negative of false accusations.
> If he phoned a radio station while she was listenning it, would he also go to jail?
I doubt it. The radio is a public forum that has nothing to do with her. As long as he doesn't mention her at all, it should be fine. (I assume; I'm no lawyer.)
Similarly, he can have a blog, and her accidentally stumbling upon it should not count as a violation.
Sending any kind of email directly to her, however, is direct contact and probably a violation of the restraining order.
In some states the order will curtail your right to purchase a firearm or, possibly, to exercise other 2nd amendment rights. Depending on your circumstances, this might endanger your life. That the courts can eliminate some of a citizen's rights based on an unsupported complaint with no due process might not be considered reasonable by everybody.
"I've just broken up with my girlfriend, it was a pretty messy event and now she's got a temporary restraining order on me... And this really pissed me off. So as an obvious next step, I went to go exercise my rights via purchasing a handgun... only to find my 2nd amendment rights had been taken away! What's become of blessed 'merica?"
The reason for this is that there is a strong possibility that person could be acquiring a firearm to assault or murder to the person who filed the restraining order. A temporary halt to your ability to purchase firearms in sensible in that circumstance.
Blocking does not prevent him from seeing her public posts, though. She may not notice, but you could still argue it's a form of stalking. And because of that notification, she now knows.
I don't think many people can understand half of what Google's UIs are trying to do or say anymore, even while we interact and use them. I wouldn't expect your local cops to be more knowledgeable from a printout.
I guess guy added her to his circles expecting a twitter-like model of following as a means of mild (or not) stalking. It's not that surprising that she got notified, but it would be great if "never send any email on my behalf" option existed in social networks.
Just opened up Google+ on a 15" Mac Book Pro in Chrome and all I see is whitespace and "You may know", "Interesting people and pages" and other useless crap, what I'm not seeing is my feed. Only around 10% of the screen space is used for things I care about, it really baffles me how Google thinks that this is a contender against Facebook. They should realise that spamming people won't make them like their horrible UI.
One of the points of the article is that it's hard to tell and control what is happening on the Google+ interface and system.
Add A/B testing and rollout of new features, utter lack of accountability and bugs, and probably no one in the world can ACTUALLY TELL if the alleged abuser actually sent an invite.
Some of that malware is really crude, and pretty much said "you didn't install any software, but here I am, a bit of software installing itself and asking you for permission. Be careful, because i could be a virus and do real damage to your system. So, you know nothing about me, and I could be dangerous. Do you want to install me?"
See also the numbers of people who fall for 419 scams.
Hell, I don't know how to use the gmail iPhone app; the Facebook iPhone app, the Reddit mobile site. I come from a generation where you click it and see what happens. Without a confirmation step that click could now land me in jail.
What's weird is that Google have the numbers and the skill to test their UI Changes. The UI must make sense to most people or Google would iterate it.
It makes me feel decidedly behind the apex. Like an old man needing a 12 year old to set the VCR clock.
> Could you possibly exaggerate any more? 10%? Really?
> With the multi column newsfeed on Google+ it's just impossible that you see less content than on Facebook.
Look at the screenshot I posted on the original content.
The point of my comment was that Google should focus on making their product actually usable instead of trying to carve out some market share by brute force.
If I'm going to my news feed, I'm expecting to see NEWS. Not people/groups etc. I might be interested in ...
Same for me around 10% even less are actual news posts from the first page I see on my "news feed".
You first have to follow/befriend someone to see any news, this is NOT different on Facebook!
If you log in with a new account on Facebook and have less than 10 active friends, you will see the same suggestions because there are not enough posts from your friends to fill your newsfeed.
I have around 160 friends in my circles on google+ and I'm following 10 communities ...
I see max 1 post. Rest is pictures I uploaded (WHY not share them ... HERE are people you might KNOW ... and "Communities you MIGHT be interested in" ... then the layout is so ridiculous that I can just see 1 or 2 posts on my small laptop screen. Sorry that's not how Facebook and Twitter look like.
Out of curiosity I just opened my g+ on a 1280 x 800 thinkpad and counted pixels and 17% was feed with my normal settings. Actually by changing the text size you can vary the percent of screen your feed takes from 0% to a max of about 75%. Facebook has a fair bit of empty space too.
The point is Google should make their product attractive instead of relying of just leveraging their existing power to promote it. It doesn't have to be exactly 1:1 for people to be expecting at least the same quality.
I think it must hinge on whether or not the guy actually acted to cause the invitation, or whether this was an automatic google thing based on previous emails between the two accounts.
If it was simply an automatic "add these people from your past emails" notification, then it seems very unreasonable to hold him to account for it. Sounds like the defendant needs a witness from Google about how Google+ works - which will almost certainly be difficult to get!
Does that only apply to the USA and UK? That is almost like "thought crime", when you look dangerous, or have similarity with someone portrayed in the media as the "bad guy". Can a person "feeling" intimidated by your look or presence sue you too? That would be ridiculous and put everyone into constant pressure to "look normal" I think.
The story was that the "perp" claims he didn't even send the invite, that Google must've generated it for him. The moral of the story is that you might be a user of G+ and not even know it.
From TFA, a perfect example of how joining G+ could lead to this predicament:
And by default, when someone joins Google+ and that person is in your Gmail contacts, Google will automatically send you a notification, along with an invitation suggesting that you "add him [or her] to your Circles to stay connected."
In such a scenario, the alleged unrestrained person could be held responsible for the fact that his alleged target had received emails from him at any time in the past, such as before the order was requested or before they even "broke up".
It may well be that there are other scenarios that require even less interaction.
I wonder if restraining orders apply to third parties contacting on behalf of the restrained person? Suppose, it's violation only if it's proven that the person willingly made third party to make contact? (Otherwise it's nearly trivial to put anyone under a restraining order to courtroom, huh.)
If they did, the third party would have a right to be told about it proactively and a right to contest it. I am betting there is no jurisdiction that does this.
A similar case happened in uk where a man sent facebook friend requests to everyone in his email list, which included his ex wife who had a restraining order againts him.
I understand what the author is trying to say but there is an awful lot of "perhaps" punctuating all the G+ bashing he manages to fit in that post. I'm guessing the relevant evidence will be reveled in court.
Also worth discussing if an invitation email, automated or otherwise, should be considered a restraining order violation.
Man: {apparently continues harassing her}
Police: {enforce}
Not seeing what the problem is here. The question of whether he actually did attempt to contact her is a fact-based one for the courts...
Similarly, if the woman receives a phone call with heavy breathing from the man's home phone number, it's certainly possible that he didn't do it: perhaps someone broke into his house and called her. He can certainly argue that in court.