The third category is information kept by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. Every time a groundless complaint is made against a home school family, H. 206 would authorize the social worker to pry into the family's private matters. H. 206 would give social workers access to private information that has nothing to do with a complaint. Whatever the complaint may be, stale information in government databases will not prove whether or not a particular complaint is true. If there is a complaint that a family has a dirty house, the confidential information in these databases will not prove or disprove the complaint.
Privacy is a valuable right.
We should insist that it be protected. The computer age with its proliferation of instantly accessible databases of information on citizens makes the privacy we still have left even more precious. H. 206 allows a massive invasion of privacy when there is no legitimate or even logical need. H. 206 effectively takes four separate government databases of information on private citizens and merges them into a new mega- database in the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Every time smaller databases are combined into large ones, the threat to privacy increases.