In the United States, a teenager is charged for criminal contempt of a protection order prohibiting all communication to a woman and her children. The woman, whom the teen’s father briefly dated, obtained the order because the teen had harassed and threatened her in real life. The teen sent a MySpace Friendship Request which asked the woman whether to deny, accept, ignore or spam future messages from the sender. The judge let the charges stand by construing the indirect request as communication.
In the United Kingdom, a husband was charged because he invited his wife to join his network in Facebook using an e-mail message. He joined Facebook to look at his friend's wedding pics, was sent to jail after the site automatically sent a "friend request" message to his estranged wife. The magistrates automatically considered this as a violation of their stay-away order from his wife.
Are the spaces we create in the internet necessary extensions of our persons? Is our actual expectations of protection and privacy in real life the same in our internet spaces? Can we demand this in our courts here?
Sources:
http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/staten_island_teen_will_face_c.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/facebook_friend_request_jail-time/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment