Privacy policy

Use short, clear sentences and include the key details about what you need. You can ask another question or rephrase your request if the answer is not what you expected. For example:

• Can I apply for free school transport?
• I applied to the housing register a week ago – what’s happening?
• I had a fall recently
• How do I get approval for my food business?

OSCAR may ask for personal information so it can understand your situation, provide more relevant guidance, and share your enquiry with the appropriate people who can help. You can choose not to provide personal information, although this may limit the guidance OSCAR can give.

Conversations with OSCAR are stored securely and are normally deleted after 365 days. If information from your conversation needs to be shared with a council service or partner organisation to help with your enquiry, that information may be retained for longer in line with that service's own retention and record-keeping requirements.

Any personal information you agree to be passed to authorised council officers will be sent via a form to the appropriate council service. Any personal information within the chatbot conversation will be redacted within the backend of the chatbot system.

OSCAR does not make any decisions about you. Only authorised Council staff or qualified individuals (where appropriate) will review the information provided and make informed decisions where required or needed.

You can exit the conversation at anytime.

OSCAR is not a replacement for professional decision making by a council officer or emergency help.

Responsible AI - OSCAR has been designed to operate in line with the Council's Responsible AI principles:

• Transparency: We will be clear when you are interacting with an AI system.
• Human oversight: Important decisions are made by people, not OSCAR.
• Privacy and security: Information is handled securely and in accordance with data protection requirements.
• Fairness: OSCAR is designed to provide consistent support to all users.
• Accountability: The Council remains responsible for the services provided through OSCAR.

Our cookie controller is set to only allow 'necessary cookies' by default. No complicated choices for you and no unnecessary data collection. You will have to explicitly opt-in, if you want to allow 'additional cookies'. This includes analytics, advertising and remarketing and allows read and write to third party cookies. For more information on cookies and related technologies used on this site, you can read our cookie policy.

Peterborough City Council retains copyright in all of its material placed on the site.

Peterborough City Council is not responsible for the contents or reliability of any external websites which this site links to, and do not necessarily endorse the views expressed within them. Links to specific pages should not be taken as endorsement of the entire website. We cannot guarantee that these links will work all of the time and often have no control over the availability of the linked pages or are notified if the content changes.

Peterborough City Council makes every effort to ensure that the information published on our website is accurate. However, we cannot accept any liability for the accuracy or content. Visitors who rely on this information do so at their own risk.

Zengenti 'load balancer' logs protect against our site being spammed or overloaded. The log includes the IP addresses of users. These are retained for 30 days. They are sometimes used for security purposes - e.g. to whitelist or blacklist certain IP addresses from accessing the CMS (content management system) or websites. These logs are machine read - no human intervention is required unless any flags or alerts are raised that require someone to access those logs. Human access is audited and the data is only accessible to a very small number of people at Zengenti responsible for hosting, support and operations.