Placer.ai is an aggregated data business that delivers extrapolated market research to retail customers and municipalities. Emphatically, Placer.ai is not a data broker, and does not sell or provide data that can be traced back to individual users.
Placer.ai processes location data that is stripped of identifiers, aggregates that data around specific points of interest, then leverages its proprietary technology to extrapolate broader predictions based on this representative sample set, much as a pollster might use a small sample size to generate insights about a much larger set of voters.
Simply put, the information Placer.ai provides on its platform centers around locations, not individuals.
The Company takes significant steps to protect individual privacy–because the identities of the individuals constituting Placer.ai’s sample data are irrelevant to Placer.ai’s business, and because privacy is and has always been a bedrock principle for Placer.ai’s architecture. To that end, Placer.ai has structured its business only to provide its customers with aggregated statistical information about brick-and-mortar locations—never any data tied to specific individuals or user devices.
Consistent with its principles and policies, Placer.ai has never sold individual-level data, including data related to any individuals visiting reproductive health facilities. It is neither in the Company’s business interests, nor in keeping with its intentional privacy commitments, to provide information about sensitive locations like Planned Parenthood clinics.
In response to the press inquiry, in order to prevent any potential misuse of Placer.ai’s platform, the Company immediately undertook an in-depth review to recategorize as sensitive–and disable user access to–aggregated data about Planned Parenthood locations, even though that survey-level data could not be used to track any individual user’s data. This is a part of an ongoing effort to remove all sensitive places from our system. The Company commits, on a permanent basis, to disabling user access to data about any additional sensitive locations that raise similar concerns–including other reproductive health providers that may not have been identified in the Company’s prior reviews.
Placer.ai’s analytics help Placer.ai’s more than 1,300 institutional customers–ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small family businesses–understand their physical locations and make informed business decisions with accurate consumer movement data. Data from Placer.ai also aids municipalities seeking to drive local economic development, distribute federal grants equitably, increase retail leasing, and provide effective services to underserved communities. In support of this important work–and in upholding our Company’s core values–Placer.ai will continue to work to give proof to the notion that analytic power and user privacy are compatible goals.
