Privacy statement

Bridgend County Borough Council does not capture or store any personal information about individuals who browse this website, except where you voluntarily choose to give us your personal details via email, an online form, or My Account.

Where you choose to complete any of our online forms the personal information you give us is used, by Bridgend County Borough Council or a third party service provider who is contracted to us, to provide the service(s) you requested.

Bridgend County Borough Council will endeavour to safeguard your information and any disclosures of that information will be in accordance with the GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Third party service providers contracted to the Council will be required to conform to the same standards.

You may withdraw your consent at any time.

Bridgend County Borough Council collects and stores only the following information that is automatically recognised: the date and time, the originating IP, the type of browser and operating system used, the URL of the referring page, the object requested, and the completion status of the request. Visitors to our website remain anonymous as none of the data collected is linked to any personal information. The information only allows us to diagnose problems with our server, and assess the popularity of the pages on the website, so that we can continually improve our site.

This site uses bitly links to monitor the usage of specific links - bitly’s privacy policy. 

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as it is needed for the service you have requested, and remove it when that purpose has been met. In the case of an online information service, your personal information is stored until you no longer wish to continue to receive the service.

If you have registered for an account on our websites, you have the option of deleting your account at any time. This will permanently delete your information and you will not be able to recover data. Please note that some information may remain in our logs for a period of time after you delete your account.

My Account is an online service that gives you quick, convenient and reliable access to council services. You can log in, view and pay your council tax bill, apply for housing benefits, set up a direct debit and notify us of any changes to your circumstances.

Information that you give will be collected by Bridgend County Borough Council. Information may be shared with relevant departments within the council, and third party providers contracted by the council. Your personal information will only be used to provide the requested service.

You may withdraw your consent at any time.

The chatbot is designed to assist with general enquiries, provide information about council services and help direct you to the appropriate department or online service. The AI may use machine learning and information from our website to improve responses over time. When you use the chatbot we may collect the content of the messages (e.g. questions/service requests) and any personal information you voluntarily provide (name, email address, reference numbers). However, we would discourage users to submit personal data (e.g. health, financial, or criminal information) through the chatbot unless specifically instructed.

All conversation data (e.g. any interactions) are stored in a UK based Mongo database. If the user’s question can be answered by information contained within general knowledge provided by Bridgend County Borough Council, then the user’s question, along with the applicable knowledge is sent via an API call to a Large Language Model (LLM), which is provided by a Third Party. The platform allows a choice of LLM which can include open-source models as well as commercial services such as OpenAI.  

View all our privacy notices for services we provide on our data protection page: