Privacy policy

Last updated: 2026-05-17

This page explains what data PlanningIntel collects when you use Planning Intelligence Chat, why we collect it, who we share it with, and how to ask us to delete it. The service is anonymous — there are no accounts. We are the data controller for the data described here. Contact [email protected] with any questions or requests.

What we collect

When you ask a question, we record the question and the answer we generate, together with technical metadata that helps us run the service and improve future versions:

• Your messages and the assistant's replies, including any addresses or postcodes you include in a question.
• A daily-rotating, salted hash of your IP address — not your IP itself. The hash lets us catch abuse and apply rate limits within a day but is unlinkable to you across days.
• A coarse browser/OS string (e.g. “Chrome / Mac OS X”) — not the full User-Agent.
• Initial referrer if your browser sends one (where you arrived from).
• Technical signals about how we generated each answer: which model we used, how long it took, how many tokens it cost, and the public planning records we retrieved to ground the response.
• A session cookie (named ps_session) so your messages remain threaded together. The cookie value is an opaque random token; your messages themselves live on our server.

We do not ask for your name, email, or any account details. We do not run third-party analytics or marketing trackers in Phase 1.

Why we collect it

• To operate the service — threading your chat, preventing abuse, and diagnosing problems.
• To improve the service — analysing which questions we answer well or poorly, refining retrieval, and tuning the system prompt.
• To build a research dataset for future phases of this project. Phase 1's explicit goal is to gather real planning-research questions so we can build better tooling. Aggregate, de-identified statistics derived from this dataset may be published. Individual messages will not be published verbatim.

Our legal basis is legitimate interest under UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f) — operating and improving a free research tool in the planning domain. The planning data we retrieve to answer your questions is itself public, statutorily-published information.

Who we share it with

To generate answers, your message text is sent to third-party processors. We pick processors with credible privacy postures, but please don't paste anything you wouldn't want them to see:

• OpenRouter (api.openrouter.ai) routes the message to the model provider we've selected (currently Google Gemini, configurable). OpenRouter and the underlying model provider receive the conversation text and the retrieval context.
• OpenAI (api.openai.com) generates the embedding vectors we use to search policies and appeal decisions. OpenAI receives short text excerpts of indexed documents — not your messages directly.
• Bristol City Council ArcGIS, planning.data.gov.uk, the Planning Inspectorate, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim — we query these public sources to gather context for your question. They see normal HTTP requests; we send no user data.

Retention

We currently retain messages indefinitely for research purposes. If you ask us to delete the data tied to your session (see below), we erase the message bodies within 30 days and keep only a hashed record that the deletion happened, for audit.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Ask us what we hold about your session.
• Ask us to delete it.
• Object to processing.
• Complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Because the service is anonymous, we identify your data by the session cookie. To exercise any of these rights, email [email protected] with the session id from your ps_session cookie. You can find it in your browser's developer tools under Application → Cookies.

Children

The service is not intended for use by anyone under 16. Please don't use it if you're under 16.

Changes

If we change how we collect or use data, we'll update this page and the date at the top. Material changes will be flagged near the chat input for at least 30 days.