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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

If the state doesn't produce records from Google, they lose. Simple.

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.

It would be even nicer if courts put a stop to this madness.

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.