GOOGLE+ BLAMED FOR RESTRAINING ORDER VIOLATION ARREST

There is very little that we currently know about how Google+ invites people to connect with you. A man who was arrested recently for sending an invite to his ex-girlfriend on Google+ claims that he never sent an invite at all, and that the invite was automatically generated by the social network.

The ex-girlfriend in this question had a restraining order against this man that prohibited the man from having any contact with her. Therefore, imagine her shock when she received a Google + invitation inviting her to join her ex-boyfriend’s circle. Google+ allows you to add your friends and acquaintances to “circles.”

The girlfriend immediately took a copy of the invite to the police, and the man was arrested. However, he claims his innocence, and says that he never sent the woman any invitation on his own. According to his lawyers, it was Google+ which automatically generated the invite, and sent it to the woman. The man believes that Google+ sends automatic invitations to everybody that you have ever contacted on any Google-related program in the past, including Gmail. Therefore, the program simply used data from any e-mail conversations the man had with his ex-girlfriend during their time together on Gmail, to send the ex-girlfriend an invite.

This is a case that is likely to involve not just family law related matters, but could also throw up questions about privacy, and how companies like Google use data mined from their users to generate automatic invites. There could be more scenarios like this in the future, in which such data-mining activities by Google actually create legal headaches for people as seems to have happened in this particular case.

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