Girl facing jail for tagging sister-in-law on Facebook

In New York, a girl has been arrested for tagging her sister-in-law on the social network website, Facebook, on charges of violating a restraining order.

The girl in question, Maria Gonzalez, was not allowed to contact her sister under a protection order. As a result, when Gonzalez took to Facebook to allegedly insult her sister-in-law and also tagged her in the particular post, she was arrested for infringing the protection order.

A New York judge, acting Westchester County Supreme Court Justice Susan Capeci, has ruled that the notification generated by Facebook as a result of the tag represented an infringement of the protection order. Citing a phrase in the protection order that read “by electronic or any other means”, the judge said that the mere notification of the tag on Facebook was enough to violate the order. Gonzalez is now facing as much as a year in jail on charges of second-degree criminal contempt.

With growing surveillance and an increased focus on laws against cyber-crimes, there have been a lot of cases of people being arrested for their actions on social media in recent days, but this is a first in which a person has been charged with such a serious punishment for what seems like such a minor offense.

Source- NYLawJournal