How many people are using Richmond’s parks?
Decades ago, there was no inexpensive or easy way to answer that question with any degree of precision. Officials might visit sites and tally cars in the parking lot, or install turnstiles that could count the number of those who pass through.
But today, a vast majority of people are carrying a handy little device that tracks their every move: their cellphone.
And, through a complex web of user agreements and data sales, officials are able to determine, not only how many people visited city parks, but also where they came from, how long they stayed and where they went afterward.
They can even make educated guesses about where park visitors live, their level of education, how much money they make and how they use social media.
All of that information is available to City Hall’s Department of Parks and Recreation through a deal with Placer.ai: a jointly California- and Israel-based location analytics platform that collects cellphone geolocation data and sells it to a customer base that includes governments, small businesses and large corporations.
Under a three-year agreement that began in 2024, city officials will have paid a total of $109,500 for access to that data by the end of 2026, according to city spokesperson Tamara Jenkins — who explained that officials are using it to figure out how best to allocate city resources.
“This data has been beneficial to seeing when parks are getting the most usage, how long visitors stay in parks and how different special events, new amenities, etc., draw people into our public spaces,” Jenkins said.
That information, in turn, shapes officials’ decisions on “planning, staffing, grant writing, maintenance and capital maintenance forecasting purposes,” Jenkins said.
The city doesn’t have an explicit, written policy for the use of the data, but Jenkins said that it is “only available to Parks and Recreation” and is not shared with Richmond police or other investigative agencies.
What does the data show?
Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, The Times-Dispatch sought data on park visitors provided by Placer.ai to city officials.
Responsive records show that, between July 2025 and June 2026, William Byrd Park saw 1.4 million visitors. Joseph Bryan Park saw nearly 670,000, while Forest Hill Park saw around 385,000.
Placer.ai’s data includes a granular look at the times of the year, days of the week and times of day during which visits at each park are most common. It also breaks down the archetypal park user based on location tracking and census data.
For example, over 60% of Forest Hill Park visitors appear to consider Carytown among their “favorite places,” according to the data. Bryan Park visitors, on the other hand, prefer Short Pump Town Center.
Meanwhile, at Byrd Park, over half of visitors are white, 29% are Black, 9% are Hispanic or Latino and 4% are “Asian.”
The average annual household income of a Byrd Park visitor is about $114,000, the data shows. And 30% of visitors are likely to have a bachelor’s degree, while 5% are unemployed and 11% are divorced.
About 21% of Bryan Park visitors work from home, the data shows. But for the Bryan Park visitors who drive to work — 73% — the median travel time to work is 20 minutes.
The data tracks “visitor routes” — how visitors came and went, including what roads they took to get to the parks. Each park report notes that “the beginning points … for each route are approximations.”
“Home locations are obfuscated for privacy and randomly placed within a census block,” the reports read.
How does Placer.ai work?
When you download most any new application onto your phone, you sign a user agreement.
Among other things, that agreement outlines what data the app is permitted to collect from your device and how that data may be used. In many cases, user agreements allow for the collection and sale of geolocation data — and, in some cases, even demographic details and phone use habits.
Placer.ai obtains its data from the developers of those apps and, in turn, sells it to customers.
“This technology tracks cellphone data based on opt-ins via app downloads and purchases on individuals’ cellphones,” Jenkins said. “That data is then anonymized and used to build projections.”
In other words: Placer.ai can see how many people accessed a certain area over a given period of time — and even track movement patterns and build profiles — but it can’t determine who, exactly, those people are.
“The critical thing is, we don’t collect any personal information,” said R.J. Hottovy, who leads analytical research at Placer.ai. “So, for example, we don’t know that it’s R.J.’s phone that went to that store. We just know that a device went to that store.”
Hottovy said Placer.ai partners with “dozens of mobile app companies” to source location data on roughly 30 million devices across the U.S. He declined to identify most of those partnerships, citing nondisclosure agreements, but he did say Placer.ai works with the family location sharing app Life360.
He also said car insurance apps that track driving practices in exchange for better rates make for great data partners.
“Generally speaking, they’re going to be apps that are generally on pretty regularly, apps that (are) on in the background,” he said. “Those are situations we like because we can get better data from that.”
Placer.ai’s customers include over 5,000 municipal agencies and civic groups; retail, restaurant and consumer goods enterprises; financial services companies; and “pretty much anything with physical assets,” Hottovy said.
By using data to make credible assumptions about the movements and preferences of different types of people, Placer.ai’s customers can better understand consumer behaviors and make business decisions accordingly: where to build a second location, what times to open and close, how to attract more tourism, and how to capture the attention of the target audience.
“The way to think about it is, if that device goes back to a ZIP code every night, that’s probably its home location,” Hottovy explained. “And our third-party data providers have data about that ZIP code, things like household income and social media preferences.”
“When we overlay other data on top of our visitation data, we can start to answer things like the why and the how,” he said.
U.S. Senators, privacy advocates express concern
While Placer.ai is able to help customers assemble likely profiles based on the longitudinal and latitudinal data it offers, Hottovy said that data arrives at the company totally stripped of any personally identifying information, making it impossible to track an individual person.
But that hasn’t totally shielded the company from controversy in recent years.
In 2022, a group of 13 U.S. Senators led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter to executives of Placer.ai and another data broker, blasting them for gathering and selling the cellphone location data of people who had visited abortion clinics.
Warren characterized those sales as an egregious privacy violation, noting her fear that, with Roe v. Wade overturned and states working to criminalize abortion, Placer.ai’s data could subject abortion clinic visitors to prosecution or other safety risks.
In response, Placer.ai publicly committed to “disabling user access to data about … sensitive locations.” Hottovy said those sensitive locations include healthcare facilities and government buildings.
Hottovy also said Placer.ai does not sell data to law enforcement or investigative agencies, and noted that “any device that is characteristic of a minor (is) automatically excluded” from Placer.ai’s data.
“There’s no way to target individuals with our data,” he said. “We’ve always been a privacy-first company, and there’s never going to be a point where we have any personal information data. That’s just something we’re not going to do.”
Cellphone users can opt out of most data-sharing user agreements, Hottovy said. But to Steven Keener, the very setup of platforms like Placer.ai makes it effectively impossible to be completely disentangled — and that’s likely by design.
“To me, this is just another example of where people don’t know that they’re being surveilled,” said Keener, a professor at Christopher Newport University and the director of the school’s Center for Crime, Equity and Justice Research and Policy.
Opting out of location sharing in every app that tracks cellphone users — navigation, rideshare, weather, social media, finance and personal health apps, to name just a few — could take hours of tedious work, assuming the application could even function without location access, Keener pointed out.
“It’s very hard to live today without a smartphone in your pocket and with these apps,” Keener said. “And everybody is just clicking ‘agree’ to the terms of service. We all do that. The idea that, embedded in that, you’d have government tracking is really quite alarming.”
Keener also expressed skepticism about the anonymity of the data — and Placer.ai’s commitments not to track devices into certain areas.
“Once you start integrating locations with the profile data, your ‘anonymous data’ is becoming far less anonymous,” he said. “And these companies … make promises all the time. They say, ‘We won’t use it this way, we won’t use it to track women into Planned Parenthood clinics.’
“But in reality, if you don’t have strong legislative guardrails to prevent that from happening, the company can and will change that at any time that makes sense for them,” he said.
That’s exactly what happened with Flock automatic license plate readers, Keener said. Manufacturers initially assured the public that the cameras were for “local police use.” But today, Flock is used by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“We can’t just keep taking their word for it,” Keener said. “It’s only going to get more invasive.”