THE RIGHT TO REMEMBER ACT
An Act Establishing the Rights to Remember, Understand, Be Understood in Context, Participate with Support, Carry Personal Context Forward, and Know and Challenge Consequential Decisions
Proposed Massachusetts Legislation — Legislative Counsel Draft — August 20, 2026
HUMAN PURPOSE
A human life does not begin when a new doctor opens a chart, when a new caseworker receives a file, when a new attorney enters a case, when a new teacher reads a plan, when a person enters a hospital, or when a new artificial-intelligence system opens a conversation.
The person already has a history.
That history is more than institutional records. It can include medical and legal information, but also relationships, goals, routines, explanations that worked, questions that remain unanswered, photographs, texts, conversations, a parent's voicemail, a favorite song, a remembered meal, a handwritten page, a device that helped a person communicate, and the small details by which people recognize one another.
Modern institutions can preserve enormous quantities of information while the individual is still expected to remember which pieces matter, repeat the same history, understand dense rules, identify contradictions across systems, and reconstruct context after every transition.
That burden is unrealistic.
People become sick. People become exhausted. People forget. People communicate differently. People need more time. People sometimes understand only after information is written down, repeated, shown visually, discussed with somebody they trust, or connected to an earlier experience. Families, doctors, attorneys, teachers, caseworkers, caregivers, software providers, and artificial-intelligence systems all change.
Sometimes a person's problem is not inability. The missing support may be a patient explanation, a reminder, a note, a recording, a second set of eyes, step-by-step coaching, assistive technology, or somebody willing to stay with the person long enough for the person to do the work themselves.
The Commonwealth therefore has an interest in protecting personal continuity.
The purpose of this Act is not to make artificial intelligence authoritative. It is not to replace physicians, attorneys, judges, teachers, families, supporters, caregivers, or human judgment. It is to make it easier for a person to preserve their life, understand what is happening, use lawful tools and trusted people, carry context across time and institutions, and challenge consequential decisions without starting from zero.
The Act also recognizes a reciprocal principle: when a government agency, provider, insurer, contractor, or other covered entity materially uses artificial intelligence or automated analysis in a consequential decision about a person, that computational involvement becomes part of the history of how the decision was made and should not disappear from the record.
No one should have to remember everything alone.
Continuity belongs to the person.
PART I — SIX RIGHTS AND DEFINITIONS
Section 1. The Six Rights of Personal Continuity
The rights established by this Act shall be interpreted through six permanent principles. Each right shall guide interpretation of the operative provisions of this Act and agency rulemaking within lawful jurisdiction. The labels R1 through R6 are interpretive shorthand and do not independently create a cause of action or remedy beyond the operative provisions of this Act.
Nothing in R1 through R6, standing alone, requires a person to use artificial intelligence or create a continuity record; makes a personal account, institutional record, or computational inference automatically true; creates a new professional standard of care; delays emergency action otherwise authorized by law; or requires a covered entity to accept a person's interpretation as fact.
The interpretive shorthand in R1 through R6, standing alone, does not require a covered entity to create new substantive analysis that does not otherwise exist. This sentence does not limit an explanation, notice, correction process, or other affirmative duty expressly required by an operative section of this Act or by otherwise applicable law.
R1 — The Right to Remember
A person should be able to preserve records, memories, conversations, relationships, goals, preferences, corrections, disagreements, and sources of personal meaning, and to receive reasonable assistance doing so when disability, age, illness, communication barriers, institutionalization, poverty, or another substantial barrier makes independent preservation impracticable.
R2 — The Right to Understand
A person should be able to receive consequential information in a form reasonably designed to enable that person to understand it, ask questions about it, and use lawful human or technological assistance to make it usable.
R3 — The Right to Be Understood in Context
A person should be able to preserve and use context about how they communicate, learn, remember, respond, make choices, pursue goals, and receive support. Human beings and computational systems inevitably form impressions and inferences. The protection is not a fictional prohibition on inference; it is the right to distinguish inference from fact, inspect consequential inferences when reasonably available, challenge them, and prevent an inference from silently becoming the person's own statement or a professional diagnosis.
R4 — The Right to Participate With Support
A person should be able to use chosen people, accessibility tools, artificial intelligence, reminders, notes, remote assistance, education, and other lawful supports to participate in their own life. Needing support shall not, by itself, transfer authority away from the person.
R5 — The Right to Carry and Share Personal Context Forward
A person's useful history should not be trapped inside one institution, one advocate, one software provider, or one artificial-intelligence company. A person should be able to obtain, preserve, move, and selectively share information they are lawfully entitled to possess or access, subject to the rights of others and applicable law.
R6 — The Right to Know and Challenge
A person affected by a consequential decision should be able to understand what was decided, who or what materially contributed, what information mattered, what remains disputed, how to correct an error, and what review or complaint process exists. When artificial intelligence materially contributes, its role should be traceable to the extent reasonably available and legally permissible.
Section 2. Definitions
“Person”
means an individual whose information, health, services, benefits, education, employment, finances, liberty, legal rights, disability supports, housing, family relationship, or other protected interests are affected by a covered function or consequential decision. Protections under this Act shall not depend upon United States citizenship unless another law expressly requires citizenship for the underlying right or benefit.
“Personal continuity”
means the preservation and practical usability of information reasonably sufficient to allow a person or person-authorized supporter to understand how materially relevant circumstances developed over time and, where the person chooses, to preserve relationships, preferences, goals, memories, and sources of personal meaning without relying on unaided human memory alone.
“Personal continuity record”
means a person-directed collection maintained for personal continuity. It may include source records, personal accounts, communications, photographs, audio, video, voicemail, texts, documents, timelines, questions, continuity notes, contextual models, annotations, corrections, computational analyses, and disputed interpretations. Inclusion does not, by itself, establish factual accuracy, legal admissibility, or official status.
“Personal memory media”
means lawfully possessed or lawfully accessible audio, video, photographs, messages, voicemail, writings, scanned objects, digital artifacts, or other media preserved because they document a person's life, relationships, memories, voice, preferences, experiences, or sources of meaning.
“Source record”
means recorded information preserved substantially as created, received, or supplied by its original source before later summary, interpretation, annotation, or computational analysis. A source record is evidence of what the source recorded; it is not automatically proof that every statement within it is true.
“Personal account”
means a person's own statement of what the person remembers, witnessed, perceived, experienced, believed, or understood at a particular time. A personal account is evidence that the account was made and may have additional evidentiary value under applicable law, but it is not automatically proof of every underlying fact.
“Continuity note”
means a later note, summary, index entry, reminder, question, or connection derived from one or more sources for the purpose of helping a person or support team continue work over time. A continuity note should retain a path back to its source when reasonably practicable.
“Contextual model”
means an evolving working description of information that may help understand or assist a person, including communication methods, learning preferences, goals, relationships, routines, recurring concerns, sources of joy or distress, successful support strategies, and unresolved questions. A contextual model may contain inference and shall not be treated as a clinical diagnosis merely because it is structured or computationally generated.
“Contextual inference”
means a conclusion, prediction, categorization, pattern, or working impression drawn from one or more observations or records rather than directly stated by the person or established by a source record. An inference may be useful while remaining uncertain, disputed, or incomplete.
“Supported preservation”
means assistance in creating, maintaining, organizing, retrieving, or understanding a personal continuity record while seeking to preserve the person's own voice and choices.
“Supported skill-building”
means assistance that helps a person perform, learn, or practice a task themselves through explanation, demonstration, repetition, written steps, remote guidance, assistive technology, reminders, coaching, or other reasonable support rather than unnecessarily substituting another person's performance for the person's own.
“Assisted understanding”
means voluntary use of a person, accessibility device, communication system, recording or transcription tool, software, artificial intelligence, search, translation, visualization, or other lawful aid to help receive, understand, remember, organize, compare, question, or communicate information.
“Chosen supporter”
means a person selected by an individual to assist with understanding, communication, records, advocacy, learning, or decision-making. A chosen supporter obtains no independent decision-making authority merely by providing assistance. A legally authorized representative retains only the authority separately granted by law.
“Continuity support team”
means one or more people, services, accessibility tools, educational supports, health professionals, advocates, artificial-intelligence systems, or other lawful resources that the person chooses to use together for remembering, understanding, learning, communicating, preserving information, or participating in decisions.
“Covered entity”
means a state or local governmental entity; court-related administrative entity; licensed or state-regulated health-care provider or insurer; educational institution; disability-service provider; representative-payee or other entity managing funds for a person; publicly funded contractor; or other private entity performing a covered function under a contract, reimbursement arrangement, license, delegation, mandate, or other authority of the Commonwealth. For a private entity, duties under this Act attach only to the covered function materially affecting rights protected by this Act and not to unrelated activities.
“Covered function”
means delivery, administration, authorization, coordination, restriction, payment, review, or decision-making concerning health care, disability services, education, public benefits, insurance, person-managed funds, residential services, or another delegated or regulated function that materially affects a right protected by this Act. Coverage attaches to the function performed, not every unrelated activity of the entity.
“Consequential decision”
means a decision reasonably capable of materially affecting a person's health, liberty, legal rights, finances, housing, education, disability services, employment, family relationship, insurance, or access to significant public benefits.
“Material restriction”
means a restriction imposed or maintained by a covered disability-service or residential provider that substantially limits a person's liberty, communication, movement, money, visitors, transportation, food preparation, technology, education, employment, privacy, community participation, or another ordinary activity or choice.
“Artificial-intelligence system” or “AI system”
means a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers from inputs how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, classifications, rankings, summaries, or decisions that may influence physical or virtual environments.
“Automated decision system”
means a computational system, including an AI system, that materially assists, recommends, scores, ranks, classifies, or makes a decision concerning a person. Routine calculators, search functions, spell-checking, file storage, and clerical automation are not automated decision systems for purposes of this Act unless they materially influence a consequential decision.
“Material computational involvement”
means direct reliance upon, or substantive use of, computational output that materially shapes the content, priority, recommendation, rationale, communication, or outcome of a consequential decision. Routine spell-checking, arithmetic, file search, formatting, clerical routing, or similar low-level functions are not material computational involvement unless the output itself materially changes the substance or outcome of the consequential decision.
“Provenance record”
means information sufficient, to the extent reasonably available, to identify the source of information, when it was created or obtained, what inputs were used for an analysis, what human or computational system performed material analysis, what output was produced or relied upon, and whether the information or output was later challenged, corrected, modified, rejected, or superseded.
“Portable copy”
means information provided in a reasonably usable form that can be preserved independently of the institution, service, or software from which it originated. When the information is electronically maintained and reasonably available in searchable, structured, or machine-readable form, a portable copy should preserve those useful characteristics to the extent reasonably practicable.
PART II — THE SIX RIGHTS IN OPERATION
Section 3. R1 — Right to Remember and Supported Preservation
(a) A person may create, maintain, organize, annotate, preserve, and lawfully share a personal continuity record concerning their own life.
(b) A personal continuity record may preserve institutional information and personal memory media. Audio of a parent's voice, a photograph, a text conversation, a handwritten page, a recorded explanation, a family story, or another personally meaningful artifact shall not be excluded from the concept of continuity merely because an institution would not ordinarily place it in a case file.
(c) A person may authorize human or technological assistance to transcribe, index, summarize, connect, or create continuity notes from lawfully preserved conversations, recordings, documents, and other materials. Nothing in this Act creates authority to record a conversation where recording is prohibited by law or where legally required consent has not been obtained.
(d) Where reasonably practicable, a continuity note generated from a conversation or record should distinguish direct quotation, participant statement, source-record information, another person's observation, and computational inference and should retain a reference to the underlying source.
(e) A correction to a continuity note does not require alteration or destruction of the original lawful source. Later knowledge should be appended, linked, or versioned rather than silently rewriting the historical record.
(f) A person facing a substantial barrier to independent preservation because of disability, age, cognitive or communication limitation, serious illness, institutionalization, poverty, loss of family support, or another comparable circumstance may request supported preservation from a covered program that already has responsibility for case coordination, person-centered planning, communication assistance, daily-living support, educational support, or similar ongoing services.
(g) The covered program shall reasonably consider the request. When preservation assistance is reasonably necessary to make the program's existing planning, communication, educational, or daily-living support effective, the program shall provide or arrange an appropriate method within the scope of its lawful function unless another equally effective method is available or the requested method would exceed the program's authority, violate law, fundamentally alter the service, or impose an undue burden under applicable law. A denial based on fundamental alteration or undue burden shall be individualized and, upon request, explained in reasonably understandable terms together with any equally effective alternative offered. Ordinary use of an existing note-taking, transcription, scanning, export, or supporter-access function shall not, by itself, constitute an undue burden merely because some staff assistance is required.
(h) A substantial barrier may be shown by the person's request, an existing service or education plan, documented disability or communication need, observed difficulty, repeated continuity failures, or other reliable information. A new medical diagnosis shall not be required solely to prove that help taking or organizing notes would be useful.
(i) Supported preservation may include interviews, accessible writing, scanning, photography, audio or video, transcription, timelines, reminders, structured prompts, conversation notes, technology, artificial intelligence, or other reasonable methods chosen with the person.
(j) Supported preservation should preserve the person's goals, relationships, routines, preferences, questions, sources of meaning, and own words rather than reducing the person solely to diagnoses, behaviors, deficits, or service needs.
(k) Nothing in this section requires a person to create a continuity record or disclose information the person does not wish to disclose. The purpose of the record is continuity, not automatic truth.
Section 4. R2 — Right to Understand
(a) A person may use assisted understanding to organize, review, translate, search, compare, summarize, question, learn from, or communicate information relating to themselves.
(b) When a covered entity communicates a consequential decision, material restriction, financial obligation, major change in services, or other significant requirement arising from a covered function, it shall provide a meaningful explanation reasonably designed to enable the affected person to understand the substance and formulate meaningful questions.
(c) In determining what communication is reasonably effective, a covered entity should consider the nature, length, complexity, importance, and context of the information and the person's known or reasonably apparent method of communication or understanding.
(d) Appropriate methods may include plain language, written steps, accessible electronic text, visual explanation, audio, captions, sign language, translation, repetition, additional time, recorded explanation where lawful, human assistance, or person-chosen computational assistance.
(e) Delivery, mailing, electronic transmission, or signature may establish that information was sent or received but shall not, by itself, establish that a meaningful explanation occurred.
(f) For a pending consequential decision or an ongoing service relationship, the person shall have at least one reasonable means to ask follow-up questions after having sufficient time or assistance to review the information. This subsection does not create an unlimited duty of personalized counseling or perpetual question-and-answer service.
(g) For recurring, high-volume, or substantially standardized administrative decisions, a standardized accessible notice may satisfy subsection (b) as the initial explanation if it states in reasonably understandable terms the action taken, its effective date, the principal rule or basis, the material person-specific facts or data used where disclosure is lawful and reasonably available, the practical consequence, and a clear method to request review or follow-up assistance. A standardized notice does not end the duty under subsection (f) when the person timely indicates that the notice is insufficient to formulate meaningful questions, and it does not satisfy this section when the covered entity knows or reasonably should know that the format is ineffective for the person's communication or accessibility needs.
(h) A person shall not be denied a service, benefit, opportunity, accommodation, or fair process solely because the person used lawful artificial intelligence or another cognitive, organizational, accessibility, educational, or communication tool.
(i) Use of assistance shall not, by itself, establish incompetence, dishonesty, incapacity, bad faith, or lack of credibility.
(j) A covered entity may challenge the accuracy, relevance, confidentiality, security, or legal permissibility of an AI-assisted claim. It may not dismiss identifiable underlying source material solely because technology was used to locate, organize, translate, or explain it.
Section 5. R3 — Right to Be Understood in Context
(a) A person may maintain or authorize a contextual model for the purpose of improving communication, continuity, learning, reminders, support, advocacy, or self-understanding.
(b) A contextual model may include observed or reported information concerning goals, relationships, communication methods, learning styles, routines, recurring concerns, sources of meaning, triggers for confusion or distress, successful explanations, preferred supports, strengths, and areas in which the person benefits from additional time, structure, reassurance, or independent verification.
(c) Human beings and computational systems may notice patterns and form contextual inferences. An inference shall remain distinguishable, where reasonably practicable, from:
1. the person's own statement;
2. a direct observation;
3. a source record;
4. a third-party account; and
5. a professional diagnosis or formal finding.
(d) An observed pattern may generate a question without becoming a factual conclusion. A computational system may identify that a person repeatedly mentions a person, place, date, object, activity, or concern and suggest that its significance be explored. The system shall not represent an inferred meaning as the person's own stated meaning without confirmation.
(e) When a covered entity maintains a contextual inference and materially relies upon it in a consequential decision, the person shall have a reasonable opportunity, consistent with applicable law, to inspect the substance of the inference, provide context, challenge accuracy, or request correction of inaccurate underlying data.
(f) When a person-directed continuity system maintains a contextual model for the person's benefit, the system should provide a reasonable means for the person or a person-authorized supporter to correct, supplement, mark disputed, or retire a contextual inference while preserving historical version information when the person chooses.
(g) A contextual inference may remain marked as uncertain, useful, disputed, contradicted, or unresolved. The Act does not require every question about a person to be forced into a binary conclusion.
(h) Nothing in this section authorizes an unlicensed system to create a clinical diagnosis, legal conclusion, or binding capacity determination.
(i) Whether a contextual model maintained by a health-care, educational, disability-service, or other provider is part of an official, clinical, educational, or service record shall be determined by otherwise applicable law and the purpose for which the provider creates, maintains, or relies upon it. This Act does not alter record classification merely by using the term "contextual model."
Section 6. R4 — Right to Participate With Support
(a) A person may create a continuity support team consisting of people and lawful tools chosen by the person, subject to applicable privacy, professional, court, and program rules.
(b) The person may determine the scope of information available to each participant and may prospectively change or withdraw permissions to the extent permitted by law.
(c) A chosen supporter or technological tool may help the person understand information, prepare questions, keep notes, explain earlier notes, communicate with others, study, practice a skill, organize tasks, or remember where work stopped.
(d) A supporter or tool does not acquire independent authority over the person merely because the person needs assistance.
(e) Support may be in person, remote, synchronous, or asynchronous. A person shall not be denied otherwise lawful support merely because the supporter is not physically present when remote support is reasonably effective.
(f) Supported skill-building should, where appropriate, allow the person to perform the task themselves. The fact that a person benefits from step-by-step coaching, reminders, written instructions, remote guidance, or assistive technology shall not, by itself, establish inability to perform the underlying task.
(g) When a covered disability-service provider knows that a person can perform or learn an activity with reasonable support, the provider shall reasonably consider that demonstrated supported capability when designing services or reviewing a material restriction.
(h) Before maintaining a long-term material restriction, a covered disability-service provider shall, consistent with applicable law and the person's individual circumstances, reasonably consider whether less restrictive alternatives, supported skill-building, assistive technology, environmental changes, prompting, training, supervision, or periodic review could safely increase independence.
(i) Nothing in this section guarantees a particular activity, requires an unsafe practice, creates a new professional standard of care, or requires acquisition of a particular technology where doing so would be unreasonable, legally prohibited, or impose an undue burden under applicable law.
(j) A covered disability-service provider that, in good faith, permits or supports a person to engage in an activity pursuant to an individualized supported skill-building or risk-reduction plan that documents the person's choice, known material risks, reasonable supports, and a review process shall not be civilly liable solely for the decision to permit that supported participation. This subsection does not immunize negligent performance of agreed supports, negligent maintenance or selection of equipment, gross negligence, recklessness, willful misconduct, discrimination, violation of law, or conduct outside the documented plan.
(k) Nothing in this section expands the authority of a guardian, conservator, parent, health-care agent, representative payee, or other fiduciary beyond authority otherwise granted by law or by a valid court order, and no chosen supporter or technological tool may override authority specifically and lawfully assigned to another person for the matter at issue. Where a guardian has relevant authority, implementation shall remain consistent with the scope and limitations of the guardianship order and applicable law. This subsection shall not be construed to enlarge a guardian's powers merely because a person uses a continuity support team. Consistent with applicable Massachusetts guardianship law, the person's participation, expressed desires, personal values, development or recovery of self-management, and availability of less restrictive or technological assistance shall continue to be considered to the extent required by law.
Section 7. R5 — Right to Carry and Share Personal Context Forward
(a) Where a person already has a lawful right to receive a record, the covered entity shall provide it in a form reasonably usable by the person and, when already maintained electronically and reasonably producible, in an electronic form suitable for preservation, accessibility, search, or analysis. Searchable, structured, or machine-readable characteristics should be preserved when they are reasonably available and materially improve usability or continuity.
(b) When a more usable form is already maintained or can be generated without unreasonable burden and without violating law, privacy, security, privilege, or third-party rights, a covered entity shall not provide only a substantially less usable form that materially impairs lawful access, search, accessibility, comparison, or preservation. Nothing in this subsection requires disclosure in a proprietary native format when an equally useful export format is reasonably available.
(c) Existing legacy systems shall provide the most usable form reasonably producible without requiring immediate replacement. When a covered public entity newly procures or substantially replaces a system used to maintain records subject to this Act, procurement should include reasonable requirements for searchable, exportable, interoperable, and commonly usable formats appropriate to the records maintained.
(d) A person who uses a software or AI service to maintain substantial continuity information should, where technically and legally practicable, be able to export the person's own content and reasonably available continuity information, including text, timestamps, attachments, user-created organization, and provenance identifiers sufficient to continue elsewhere. This subsection does not require disclosure of model weights, source code, security controls, trade secrets unrelated to the person's data, or information belonging to another user.
(e) A person may choose privacy or openness. Supported self-direction includes the right to keep information private and the right to voluntarily discuss, preserve, publish, or contribute one's own experiences, subject to the rights of other persons and applicable law.
(f) General willingness to discuss a subject shall not automatically authorize every later use. Private storage, sharing with supporters, AI context use, public publication, research contribution, and AI training or model-improvement use may be treated as separate permissions.
(g) A person may share one folder, record, summary, or other selected portion of a continuity record without thereby authorizing access to unrelated portions.
(h) A person's use of a continuity record to complete a government form, request a benefit, communicate with a provider, or support a specific decision shall not, by itself, authorize the government or provider to access the remainder of the person's continuity record.
(i) The tool may be replaceable. The person's useful history should not be.
Section 8. R6 — Right to Know and Challenge
(a) A covered entity making or communicating a consequential decision shall, upon the affected person's reasonable request and subject to applicable law, identify in reasonably understandable terms:
1. what was decided;
2. the office or person responsible for the decision;
3. materially relevant information relied upon;
4. the rule, policy, legal authority, or professional judgment materially relied upon;
5. significant restrictions, obligations, or consequences; and
6. any available correction, complaint, reconsideration, review, or appeal process.
(b) A person shall have a reasonable mechanism to identify a material disagreement concerning information about that person where this Act or existing law permits amendment, comment, complaint, appeal, or supplemental information.
(c) A covered entity is not required to accept the person's interpretation as correct. The person shall likewise not be required to falsely characterize an unresolved matter as conclusively settled merely because an institutional record contains one version.
(d) A later correction need not destroy a lawful historical record. The correction may be linked to what came before. Preservation is not endorsement.
(e) No covered entity shall take a materially adverse action against a person because the person lawfully requested records, maintained a continuity record, asked questions, requested clarification, identified a discrepancy, preserved a disagreement, used a chosen supporter, used accessibility technology, or used lawful AI-assisted analysis concerning their own information. Protected activity need not be the sole reason for the adverse action.
(f) This protection does not excuse fraud, fabrication, threats, harassment, violence, unlawful disclosure, knowing falsification, reckless public publication of unsupported factual accusations, or other independently prohibited conduct.
(g) Adverse action for an independent lawful reason does not become retaliation merely because self-advocacy occurred beforehand. A covered entity may establish that it would have taken the same action for an independent lawful reason notwithstanding the protected activity.
PART III — APPLICATIONS OF THE SIX RIGHTS
Section 9. Longitudinal Health Continuity
(a) A patient with a complex, chronic, recurrent, materially changing, or substantially unexplained condition may request reasonable consideration of identified historical information reasonably believed relevant to a current medical question and available to the provider or lawfully supplied by the patient.
(b) A patient may use computational assistance to locate, organize, compare, or summarize diagnoses, laboratory results, medications, procedures, symptoms, imaging, family history, clinical observations, and prior treatment responses.
(c) The source records remain the evidence. AI-generated conclusions remain analytical assistance and are subject to human clinical judgment.
(d) Nothing in this section requires a clinician to review records not reasonably related to the current clinical question, use an AI system, accept an AI conclusion, or review an unlimited volume of undifferentiated material.
(e) Nothing in this section creates a new professional standard of care or expands professional liability merely because a patient used computational assistance.
(f) A provider shall not disregard identifiable source information solely because it is old, archived, originated with another provider, or was located through AI assistance when the information is reasonably related to the current clinical question.
(g) Where an AI-assisted analysis identifies a material question based on identifiable source information, the patient should have a reasonable opportunity to present the question for human clinical consideration.
Section 10. Financial Understanding and Supported Recordkeeping
(a) When a covered entity manages, holds, budgets, conserves, distributes, or substantially controls money belonging to or maintained for the benefit of a person, the person shall receive, to the extent permitted by law, a meaningful explanation of the source of the funds, current balance, legal ownership, authority to manage the funds, basis for that authority, material spending restrictions, documentation requirements, responsibility for recordkeeping, available savings or benefit-protection options, and methods for questioning or challenging an error or restriction.
(b) A person known to have difficulty remembering, organizing, or retaining receipts or transaction records should be offered an accessible and supported recordkeeping method reasonably adapted to the person's needs and the applicable program rules.
(c) Supported methods may include photographs of receipts, envelopes, bank records, shared ledgers, accessible applications, written logs, a chosen supporter, or person-authorized computational organization.
(d) An inaccessible portal or unsupported instruction shall not automatically constitute effective recordkeeping assistance merely because the system exists.
(e) Nothing in this section guarantees that every purchase is allowable, alters federal fiduciary duties, changes Social Security representative-payee obligations, or overrides ABLE, tax, guardianship, conservatorship, or other applicable financial law.
Section 11. Education, Learning, and Skill Continuity
(a) A person's educational or skill-building goal should not disappear merely because the person pauses, changes providers, loses an advocate, becomes discouraged, or needs help organizing prior work.
(b) Where a covered educational, vocational, or disability program already has a responsibility to assist the person, and the person chooses to use continuity supports, the program should permit reasonable use of notes, prior work, accessible explanations, assistive technology, or chosen support consistent with academic integrity and applicable law.
(c) A person may use a continuity support team to track goals, lessons completed, questions, strategies that worked, accommodations, and where the person stopped, so that later learning can resume without unnecessary reconstruction from memory.
(d) Nothing in this section guarantees admission, a credential, a passing score, a particular curriculum, or waiver of essential academic requirements. It protects reasonable continuity and assistance in pursuing an otherwise lawful educational goal.
Section 12. Communication, Accessibility, and Supported Technology Use
(a) A person's inability to communicate through conventional speech, hearing, reading, writing, or immediate verbal response shall not be treated as an absence of preferences, understanding, interests, or agency.
(b) A person may communicate through speech, behavior, writing, sign language, images, augmentative or alternative communication, hearing technology, captions, devices, gestures, or another effective method.
(c) When technology can reasonably help a person communicate or participate, support should seek to help the person learn and use the technology rather than assuming that another person must permanently operate it for them.
(d) A covered entity subject to existing disability-communication duties shall continue to comply with those duties. Nothing in this Act reduces rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, state disability law, or other applicable accessibility requirements.
Section 13. Voluntary Crisis Continuity and Authorized Escalation
(a) A person may voluntarily create a crisis continuity plan identifying medical context, communication preferences, records, reminders, trusted supporters, preferred forms of assistance, and instructions the person wishes to have available during a period of serious confusion, incapacity, emotional crisis, or other substantial impairment of ordinary self-advocacy.
(b) The plan may identify people the person authorizes to receive notification or selected continuity information under circumstances chosen by the person and permitted by law.
(c) Where a technological system supports such functionality, the person may authorize it to retrieve reminders, organize relevant source information, facilitate communication with designated supporters, or initiate a request for human assistance.
(d) An AI-generated inference, standing alone, shall not establish that a person lacks capacity or authorize involuntary treatment, detention, restraint, medication, guardianship, or another deprivation of liberty.
(e) Nothing in this section makes a general-purpose AI system an emergency-response service or delays emergency action otherwise authorized by law.
(f) Where reasonably practicable, an automated notification or disclosure made pursuant to a crisis continuity plan should be logged so that the person can later determine what was disclosed, when, to whom, and under what authorization.
Section 14. Continuity Through Changes in People and Providers
A change in physician, attorney, teacher, caseworker, caregiver, service provider, chosen supporter, software provider, or other participant should not unnecessarily force a person to reconstruct relevant history from memory when the information has already been preserved and may lawfully be shared.
Covered entities with ongoing responsibility for a person's services should develop reasonable transition practices appropriate to their function.
A person may pause participation in a continuity process and later resume. A lapse in documentation shall not, by itself, erase previously expressed goals or preferences.
No serious system should depend upon one human advocate remaining healthy, available, informed, and perfect forever.
PART IV — WHEN INSTITUTIONS USE AI OR AUTOMATED SYSTEMS
Section 15. Material Computational Involvement in Consequential Decisions
(a) When a covered entity materially relies upon an AI system or automated decision system in making or communicating a consequential decision about a person, the person shall, to the extent reasonably available and consistent with law, be informed that material computational involvement occurred. Where a score, prediction, classification, ranking, risk flag, recommendation, or generated rationale concerning the person is displayed to or affirmatively accessed by a human decision-maker before the consequential decision and is reasonably capable of influencing that decision, material computational involvement shall be rebuttably presumed. The covered entity may rebut that presumption with contemporaneous documentation or other reliable evidence showing that the output was not reviewed, considered, communicated, or used in making or explaining the decision.
(b) Upon reasonable request, the covered entity shall, to the extent reasonably available and consistent with law, provide information sufficient to identify:
1. the system, product, or categorical class of system used;
2. the general purpose for which it was used;
3. the categories of information about the person supplied to or materially considered by the system;
4. the nature of the material output relied upon, such as a score, classification, recommendation, summary, ranking, risk flag, or generated rationale;
5. the office or human official responsible for the final decision; and
6. whether the computational output was accepted, materially modified, rejected, or independently verified.
(c) Disclosure need not include proprietary source code, model weights, cybersecurity information, privileged material, trade secrets unrelated to the person's own decision, or information concerning another person. Categorical identification may satisfy system-identification requirements when more specific disclosure is legally protected, provided the disclosure remains sufficient to explain the material role of the system. A trade-secret or proprietary claim shall not, by itself, justify withholding the categories of personal data processed about the person or the substantive nature of a score, classification, recommendation, summary, ranking, risk flag, or other output materially relied upon in the person's consequential decision. When exact disclosure is lawfully restricted, the covered entity shall provide the most specific meaningful description permitted by law that allows the person to understand and challenge the material role of the system.
(d) For material computational involvement occurring on or after the effective date of this section, a covered entity shall preserve records reasonably sufficient to support the disclosures required by subsection (b), using existing decision records, logs, or other records where reasonably practicable. Such provenance information shall follow the same applicable retention schedule as the underlying decision record and shall not be assigned a shorter schedule solely because it documents computational involvement. This subsection does not require creation or retention of information prohibited by law or technically unavailable from a legacy system; future procurement or substantial system replacement subject to this Act should include logging sufficient for compliance.
(e) A covered entity may delay or limit disclosure where immediate disclosure is prohibited by law or would materially compromise a lawful investigation, security measure, or protected proceeding, but shall provide the greatest explanation lawfully available and any later disclosure required when the restriction ends.
(f) Where an adverse consequential decision materially relies upon computational output and no emergency or other law requires immediate final action, the person should have a reasonable opportunity for human review of a claimed material data error or misidentification before the computational output is treated as controlling.
(g) Human responsibility remains with the covered entity exercising the covered function. Use of an AI system does not, by itself, transfer public or professional responsibility to the machine.
(h) For adjudicative functions of the Massachusetts judiciary, implementation shall respect the constitutional and rulemaking authority of the Supreme Judicial Court. Court-related administrative functions remain subject to this Act to the extent permitted by law.
PART V — PERSONAL CONTINUITY INFRASTRUCTURE AND RESEARCH
Section 16. Personal Continuity Accounts and Preservation Pilot
(a) The Commonwealth shall establish standards for a voluntary personal continuity account or continuity-custodian program through which a resident may preserve a modest amount of continuity information without surrendering rights beyond those expressly provided by law.
(b) A personal continuity account may be provided through existing public infrastructure, a certified private or nonprofit custodian, a library or archival partner, an educational institution, local storage chosen by the person, or a hybrid system. No single commercial vendor shall be required by statute.
(c) Subject to appropriation, grant funding, or other lawful funding, the Commonwealth shall conduct a pilot prioritizing existing infrastructure and low-cost interoperability before construction of new systems.
(d) Pilot standards should test modest guaranteed storage, personal memory media, person-authorized continuity notes, version history, exportability, integrity verification, recovery from account loss, designated supporters, legacy instructions, selective sharing, and the ability to authorize a human or computational tool to use selected continuity information for the person's own benefit without automatically authorizing research or model training.
(e) A person should be able to choose access settings such as private access, named-supporter access, selected provider access, delayed family access, posthumous access, public historical release, research contribution, or continued restriction, subject to applicable law.
(f) A personal continuity record, continuity deposit, legacy continuity record, or personally identifying continuity metadata held by a governmental or other public custodian solely for a voluntary program established under this Act shall not be deemed a public record solely by reason of that custody and is specifically exempt from public disclosure to the extent authorized by clause Twenty-sixth (a) of section 7 of chapter 4 and chapter 66. Disclosure remains permitted when affirmatively authorized by the person or when otherwise required by law, compulsory legal process, or court order.
(g) Subsection (f) does not exempt otherwise-public administrative records concerning program expenditures, contracts, procurement, audits, security standards, aggregate participation, or program performance when those records can be disclosed without revealing protected continuity content or personally identifying participant information.
(h) Custodial possession does not authorize substantive government use of continuity content for an unrelated investigation, eligibility determination, risk classification, enforcement action, or other consequential decision. A governmental custodian may access content only to the extent reasonably necessary to operate, secure, recover, make accessible, or provide person-authorized support for the account, or as otherwise required by law. Material custodial access should be logged where reasonably practicable.
(i) A custodian shall not sell deposited information, use it for unrelated commercial profiling, or use it for AI training or model improvement without separate affirmative authorization.
(j) The administering agency shall report to the Legislature on participation, cost, accessibility, security, preservation reliability, storage needs, custodial models, privacy risks, and whether expansion is warranted.
(k) Creation or deposit of a personal continuity record shall not, by itself, make the entire continuity account presumptively discoverable in an unrelated civil proceeding. A civil discovery request directed to continuity content should identify with reasonable particularity the categories of information sought and their relationship to a claim or defense. Consistent with the constitutional and rulemaking authority of the judiciary, a court considering production should be able to limit blanket or disproportionate requests and consider whether the requested material is directly relevant, whether substantially equivalent information is reasonably available from a less intrusive source, the privacy interests of the person and third parties, and the burden and benefit of the requested production. Nothing in this subsection creates an absolute evidentiary privilege or prevents a court from ordering production of specific, relevant, nonprivileged information as permitted by law.
(l) If sufficient public funding to operate the pilot described in subsection (c) has not been appropriated or otherwise lawfully secured within 18 months after enactment, the administering agency shall nonetheless, to the extent within its lawful authority, promulgate by 24 months after enactment minimum voluntary certification standards under which nonprofit, educational, or private continuity custodians may seek approval to offer personal continuity accounts subject to this Act's privacy, security, selective-sharing, portability, recovery, custodial-access, and secondary-use protections. This subsection does not require the Commonwealth to subsidize private accounts, guarantee that a certified provider will be available, or authorize conduct prohibited by other law.
Section 17. Voluntary Research and AI Contribution
(a) A person may voluntarily authorize selected continuity information for a specified research, accessibility, service-improvement, public-interest, or artificial-intelligence development purpose.
(b) Private continuity use, AI context use for the person's own benefit, research use, publication, and AI training or model-improvement use are separate choices. Permission for one shall not automatically constitute permission for another.
(c) Participation shall not be a condition of receiving a public benefit, health service, disability service, education, housing, financial assistance, or other covered service. Refusal shall not be treated as evidence of noncooperation, risk, incapacity, or lack of credibility.
(d) A research-contribution agreement shall state in reasonably understandable language the categories of information shared, intended purpose, recipients, whether data will be identified, pseudonymized, de-identified, or aggregated, whether AI training or evaluation is permitted, expected retention, compensation if any, and practical limits on withdrawal after completed analyses or model training.
(e) Removing a name shall not, by itself, be represented as anonymization. Exact dates, rare events, family relationships, locations, photographs, audio, voice characteristics, and rich life narratives may permit re-identification.
(f) Health information represented as de-identified under HIPAA shall satisfy applicable federal de-identification standards. Other continuity data shall use risk-appropriate data minimization, generalization, access controls, separation of re-identification keys, aggregation, expert review, or comparable safeguards appropriate to the intended use.
(g) A recipient of pseudonymized or de-identified continuity data shall not attempt to re-identify a contributor except with specific authorization or where law independently requires it.
(h) Research contributions shall retain provenance sufficient to distinguish personal accounts, institutional source records, third-party reports, transformations, and computational inference.
(i) Research programs may provide reasonable participant compensation or use research fees to support storage, scanning, accessibility, interviews, supported preservation, participant review, and other costs of producing and maintaining high-quality human continuity data, provided compensation is not coercive.
(j) Applicable federal and state human-subjects, privacy, education, substance-use, health-information, and research-ethics requirements remain in effect.
PART VI — PRIVACY, LIMITS, AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Section 18. Privacy, Secondary Use, and No Independent AI Authority
(a) Nothing in this Act requires a person to upload private information to an AI system, create a continuity record, join a preservation pilot, participate in research, or make personal information public.
(b) Information supplied solely for a continuity account, supported-preservation archive, legacy record, or research contribution shall not, merely because it is available to a public or certified custodian, be repurposed to make an adverse consequential decision about the contributor.
(c) Such information may be used for a consequential decision when the person affirmatively supplied or authorized it for that purpose, the same information was lawfully obtained from an independent source for that purpose, use is required by law or court order, or use is reasonably necessary to address an immediate legally recognized risk of serious harm.
(d) Nothing in this Act creates legal personhood for AI, makes AI the final authority concerning a person, authorizes AI to practice medicine or law beyond existing law, requires a court to accept an AI conclusion, requires a clinician to follow an AI recommendation, requires an agency to agree with AI analysis, or creates a presumption that AI output is accurate.
(e) AI may identify questions, organize information, compare records, explain information, maintain continuity notes, suggest memory cues, and identify apparent patterns or contradictions. AI may be wrong. Human beings and institutions may also be wrong.
(f) The purpose of this Act is to improve continuity, understanding, participation, and traceability of reasoning, not to declare any participant infallible.
Section 19. Enforcement, Rulemaking, and Equal Access
(a) Each state agency with regulatory authority over a covered function shall incorporate applicable rights under this Act into existing complaint, licensing, audit, review, or appeal processes where reasonably practicable.
(b) A person shall not be required to rely exclusively upon the employee or office whose conduct is being challenged when an existing supervisory, regulatory, ombudsman, inspector-general, or external complaint mechanism is available.
(c) The Attorney General may investigate patterns or practices involving material retaliation, systemic denial of rights established by this Act, or violations for which no adequate specialized enforcement mechanism exists, and may seek relief to the extent authorized by law.
(d) The appropriate agencies may promulgate regulations addressing supported preservation, accessibility, continuity accounts, custodians, research contribution, institutional AI disclosure, provenance, portability, supported recordkeeping, data security, and other implementation requirements within their lawful jurisdiction.
(e) Rights that can only be exercised by wealthy, highly technical, highly literate, or unusually persistent people are incomplete. Implementation shall prioritize accessible and low-cost methods for people with disabilities, limited income, limited digital literacy, communication barriers, cognitive barriers, institutional isolation, or other substantial disadvantages.
(f) Implementation should favor existing infrastructure, libraries, community organizations, accessibility programs, open or commonly usable standards, and low-cost interoperability before expensive new systems are required.
(g) Nothing in this section limits an existing right, remedy, complaint process, cause of action, or accommodation otherwise available by law.
(h) A person aggrieved by a knowing or repeated violation of Section 8(e) or Section 15 may bring an action for declaratory or injunctive relief in a court of competent jurisdiction after providing written notice and a reasonable opportunity to cure, which shall not exceed 30 calendar days after receipt of the notice unless the person agrees in writing to a longer period or a court orders otherwise. No cure period is required for ongoing retaliation or where delay would create a substantial risk of irreparable harm. This cure provision does not extend a shorter deadline imposed by other law and does not toll an otherwise applicable appeal, filing, preservation, or limitations deadline unless another law so provides. A prevailing plaintiff may be awarded reasonable attorney's fees and costs where the court finds the violation knowing, willful, or repeated. This subsection does not create statutory damages and does not limit damages or remedies otherwise available by law.
(i) For a claimed violation of Section 7 involving records the person is already lawfully entitled to receive, including refusal to provide a reasonably usable electronic copy when the record is already maintained electronically and reasonably producible, a portability failure, or substantial usability degradation prohibited by Section 7(b), the person shall first use any existing specialized record-access remedy that is reasonably available. Where no adequate specialized remedy exists, the person may seek declaratory or injunctive relief after written notice and a reasonable opportunity to cure, which shall not exceed 30 calendar days after receipt of the notice unless the person agrees in writing to a longer period or a court orders otherwise. This subsection does not extend any shorter deadline or remedy available under otherwise applicable record-access law and does not toll an otherwise applicable appeal, filing, preservation, or limitations deadline unless another law so provides.
(j) Good-faith technical or administrative error that is promptly corrected after notice shall not, standing alone, support attorney's fees or monetary liability under this Act. Nothing in this subsection limits relief necessary to stop ongoing retaliation, prevent destruction or loss of records, or avoid irreparable harm.
Section 20. Construction, Emergencies, Severability, and Effective Date
(a) This Act shall operate to the fullest extent consistent with federal law and the constitutional authority of the Commonwealth and its courts.
(b) Nothing in this Act establishes that a personal archive is automatically true, an institutional record is automatically true, an AI analysis is automatically true, a disputed allegation is automatically false, or an unresolved question must be forced into a binary conclusion.
(c) Nothing in this Act creates ownership of records where ownership is otherwise determined by law. It establishes rights of access, continuity, preservation, understanding, participation, portability, traceability, and review only to the extent specified.
(d) Nothing in this Act alters judicial evidentiary standards, professional licensing requirements, federal fiduciary duties, attorney-client privilege, sealed-record rules, legally protected third-party information, guardianship or conservatorship authority, parental authority, protective orders, or other privacy rights except where the Act expressly provides otherwise and the Commonwealth has authority to do so. Section 16(k) establishes a targeted continuity-privacy consideration for civil discovery but does not create an absolute evidentiary privilege.
(e) Nothing in this Act creates an automatic right to delay emergency medical treatment, immediate protective intervention, lawful emergency psychiatric action, mandatory reporting, a court-ordered deadline, or another action where delay would create a legally recognized risk of serious harm.
(f) If any provision or application of this Act is held invalid, the remaining provisions shall continue to have effect to the greatest extent legally permissible.
(g) Except as otherwise provided, this Act shall take effect 180 days after enactment. Regulations and funded infrastructure pilots may be phased in on a publicly available schedule. Lack of pilot funding shall not delay the other substantive rights established by this Act.
CENTRAL INTERPRETIVE PRINCIPLE
No person's meaningful participation in their own life should depend upon their ability, or another individual's ability, to perfectly remember information that could reasonably have been preserved and made usable.
Continuity includes not only institutional facts, but the memories, voices, relationships, preferences, goals, routines, explanations, and sources of meaning that help a person remain recognizable across time.
Inference is unavoidable. Unaccountable inference is the problem.
Support should increase a person's ability and confidence to participate, not merely substitute another person's performance or judgment.
LEGISLATIVE NOTES, EXISTING-LAW ANCHORS, AND PENDING LEGISLATIVE CONTEXT
*Not statutory text. Included for Legislative Counsel and adversarial peer review.*
1. Massachusetts Fair Information Practices Act — M.G.L. c. 66A, § 2. Existing Massachusetts law already requires state personal-data holders to maintain procedures allowing a data subject to contest accuracy and, when the holder disagrees, to note the subject's claim and include it with later disclosure of the disputed data. This supports the structured-disagreement principle.
2. Americans with Disabilities Act — effective communication. Federal ADA guidance emphasizes effective communication based on the nature, length, complexity, context, and person's normal communication method, and recognizes aids including qualified notetakers, assistive listening systems, captioning, accessible electronic text, and other technology. This supports R2 and R4 without making signature or mere delivery the test of understanding.
3. HIPAA right of access — 45 C.F.R. § 164.524. HHS states that access rights generally extend to designated record-set information regardless of age or archival location and that electronic information should be provided in a requested readily producible format, with machine-readable electronic copies expected to the extent possible. HIPAA does not require creation of new explanatory analysis. This supports the distinction between access and assisted longitudinal understanding.
4. Massachusetts supported decision-making proposal — S.155, 194th General Court. As of this working draft, S.155 has been reported favorably and referred to Senate Ways and Means. Its text recognizes voluntary supported decision-making, accessible plain-language agreements, support in understanding information, supporter respect for the person's values and preferences, and the rule that supporters do not make decisions for the decision-maker. The Right to Remember Act should complement rather than duplicate this proposal.
5. Massachusetts governmental AI use. The Commonwealth announced a phased ChatGPT-powered enterprise AI assistant for approximately 40,000 executive-branch employees in 2026. Commonwealth AI principles state that employees remain accountable for AI-supported decisions, must review and validate outputs, and that AI use should be transparent and accountable. This supports R6 and Section 15.
6. Existing Commonwealth infrastructure. EOTSS already uses AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform for Commonwealth applications and data storage. The State Library of Massachusetts operates digital repositories intended for long-term preservation. These facts do not prove that existing systems can host private personal continuity accounts without modification, but they support testing existing infrastructure before assuming an entirely new statewide platform must be built.
7. De-identification. HHS recognizes HIPAA Safe Harbor and Expert Determination methods and expressly notes that de-identified data retains some re-identification risk. Rich continuity data therefore requires risk-based safeguards rather than treating removal of names as sufficient anonymization.
8. Existing Massachusetts private enforcement models. M.G.L. c. 214, § 3B provides damages, injunctions, costs, and reasonable attorney's fees for violations of the Fair Information Practices Act, and M.G.L. c. 66, § 10A provides direct Superior Court enforcement, injunctive relief, and fee-shifting for public-records violations. These statutes demonstrate that targeted private enforcement of information rights is not novel in Massachusetts.
9. Existing Massachusetts risk-sharing models. M.G.L. c. 119, § 33C provides qualified tort immunity when trained congregate-care staff apply the reasonable and prudent parent standard to allow foster children to participate in age- or developmentally-appropriate activities, while preserving liability for gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional harm. Current supported-decision-making proposal S.155 also contains good-faith reliance immunity. These are useful analogies for a narrowly drafted supported-skill-building safe harbor, but they do not justify blanket immunity for negligent delivery of promised supports.
10. Trade-secret limits and AI transparency proposals. The Massachusetts Public Records definition in M.G.L. c. 4, § 7, cl. 26(g) protects certain voluntarily supplied confidential trade-secret information but expressly withholds that exemption from information submitted as required by law or as a condition of a government contract or benefit. Current Massachusetts AI proposals, including H.94 and HD.6293, separately contemplate notice of material AI influence, categories of data processed, and explanations of how AI affected consequential decisions while preserving legitimate proprietary protections. Section 15 should protect true trade secrets without allowing the label to erase person-specific inputs and materially relied-upon outputs.
11. Public-custodian privacy. M.G.L. c. 4, § 7, cl. 26 broadly defines public records as documentary materials or data made or received by Commonwealth and local governmental entities, while subclause (a) excludes material specifically or by necessary implication exempted from disclosure by statute. Because a voluntary personal continuity account may contain intensely private material far beyond ordinary agency records, Section 16 expressly classifies person-deposited continuity content and identifying continuity metadata as nonpublic while preserving transparency for program administration, spending, contracts, and aggregate performance.
12. Judicial implementation. M.G.L. c. 211, § 3 gives the Supreme Judicial Court general superintendence over inferior courts and authority to issue rules necessary or desirable for court administration. Section 15(h) therefore routes adjudicative implementation through that constitutional and rulemaking structure while leaving court-related administrative functions subject to the Act to the extent permitted by law.
16. Final sabotage-hardening choices before Legislative Counsel review. Section 7(b) now uses an objective usability rule rather than requiring proof of intent, while preserving legitimate technical, legal, privacy, security, and proprietary-format limits. Section 15(a) uses a rebuttable presumption when a consequential score, prediction, classification, ranking, risk flag, recommendation, or generated rationale is actually presented to or affirmatively accessed by a decision-maker before the decision, rather than presuming materiality merely because software touched a file. Section 19 uses a 30-calendar-day maximum fallback cure period without extending shorter existing deadlines. Section 16(l) prevents lack of pilot appropriation from blocking promulgation of voluntary custodian standards, while not requiring the Commonwealth to subsidize private accounts.
13. Guardianship and retained participation. M.G.L. c. 190B, § 5-306 directs courts to maximize self-reliance and independence, requires consideration of less restrictive means including technological assistance, and permits limited guardianship. Section 5-309 directs a guardian to exercise authority only as necessitated by the person's limitations, encourage participation and action on the person's own behalf, and consider the person's expressed desires and personal values. Section 6(k) is intended to respect lawful guardianship authority without silently converting a guardianship into broader control than the court ordered.
14. Continuity records and civil discovery. Massachusetts Rule of Civil Procedure 26 permits discovery of relevant, nonprivileged matter but also authorizes protective orders against annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, undue burden, or disproportionate electronic discovery, including limits based on availability of less burdensome sources and the balance of burden and benefit. Section 16(k) does not attempt to create an absolute privilege; it directs attention to particularity, relevance, proportionality, alternative sources, and the unusually broad privacy consequences of a life-spanning continuity archive. Legislative Counsel and the Supreme Judicial Court should review the final placement and wording.
15. Standardized decisions and individualized understanding. Existing public-benefit systems already use standardized notices and appeal mechanisms at scale. Section 4(g) therefore permits a standardized accessible notice to serve as the first layer of explanation for high-volume decisions while preserving a person's follow-up right and accessibility protections when the standard notice is not enough.
OPEN QUESTIONS FOR THE NEXT ADVERSARIAL REVIEW
1. Beyond Section 15(h), which specific R1-R6 duties require Supreme Judicial Court rules, standing orders, or record-access procedures for adjudicative use?
2. Should the targeted private enforcement in Section 19 remain limited to retaliation, institutional-AI disclosure, and otherwise-unremedied access/portability violations, or should a narrowly defined R2 meaningful-explanation violation receive direct injunctive enforcement after notice and cure?
3. Is the Section 6(j) supported-skill-building safe harbor appropriately limited to the decision to permit supported participation while preserving liability for negligent delivery of promised supports?
4. What minimum storage allocation, recovery method, accessibility standard, continuity-export standard, and custodian-certification process should regulations require without creating an excessive fiscal mandate?
5. Does the explicit Section 16 public-records exemption require a conforming amendment to M.G.L. c. 4, § 7, cl. 26, or is the Act-specific exemption sufficient under subclause (a)?
6. Section 6(k) now addresses the basic guardianship collision. What additional safeguards are needed for minors, deceased persons, family archives, domestic-violence situations, and information about third parties, and which of those safeguards should be statutory rather than regulatory?
7. Section 16(k) now addresses blanket civil discovery at a high level. How should continuity privacy and computational provenance interact with specific civil discovery, criminal procedure, insurance law, vendor contracts, lawful investigative secrecy, privileges, and different record-retention schedules, and which portions require Supreme Judicial Court rulemaking?
8. Which research uses require IRB or other federal human-subjects review, and how should compensation be structured to avoid coercion?
9. Can existing disability, vocational, adult-education, library, and community-college infrastructure deliver supported preservation and learning continuity before creating new programs?
10. Which provisions can be enacted immediately as procedural rights even if the preservation pilot is delayed by funding?
11. Should Section 19(h) add reckless disregard as a trigger for direct injunctive enforcement, or would that broaden the remedy beyond what is politically and administratively necessary?
