SafeGraph
Geolocation alternative data provider · 20 listed datasets
Datasets from SafeGraph (20)
SafeGraph is a US data company that gathers location data from mobile devices and sells anonymized, spatially aggregated datasets about places and human movement.[2] It is best known for its Places platform, a point-of-interest database covering more than 80 million POIs across over 195 countries and territories, alongside Geometry building-footprint polygons, structured address data, and Spend transaction data tied to POIs.[1]
Founded and led for years by entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, previously CEO of LiveRamp, SafeGraph announced Jason Richman as its new chief executive in October 2024, with Hoffman remaining as chairman.[2]
What It Does
The company supplies clean, frequently updated place data used to contextualize locations, power location-aware applications, track store openings and closures for market analysis, support site selection and trade-area studies in retail and commercial real estate, and enrich investment research and card transactions.[1]
Data And Methodology
SafeGraph's core method is aggregating device-level location signals from mobile devices into anonymized movement patterns at a spatial level.[2] Its commercial datasets are delivered production-ready through integrations including Snowflake, AWS Marketplace, Databricks, CARTO, and Esri's ArcGIS.[1]
Products
Current product lines are Places (POI attributes such as category, geocode, open/closed status), Geometry (place footprints for attribution accuracy), Address (structured global addresses for validation and routing), and Spend (aggregated transaction data linked to POIs); documented customers include Clear Channel Europe, Olvin, Mobsta, Avison Young, and Spade.[1]
Compliance And Controversy
Public-records requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that between 2018 and 2020 SafeGraph and its spin-off Veraset sold or gave device-specific location data about millions of people to US government agencies.[2] In 2021 Google banned SafeGraph from its Android app marketplace for policy violations related to its SDK.[2]
In May 2022, Motherboard reported that aggregate data revealing movements of visitors to abortion providers including Planned Parenthood was purchasable from SafeGraph; shortly afterward the company announced it would stop selling data about movements to and from family planning centers.[2]
Landscape
SafeGraph's Places dataset became a de facto reference layer for US mobility research, widely cited in academic analyses of mobile location-data bias alongside competitors in POI and foot-traffic data such as Placer.ai and Foursquare.[1][2]
More datasets from SafeGraph
SafeGraph lists 20 datasets on this encyclopedia. The most representative listings:
More about Foot Traffic & Mobility
Foot Traffic & Mobility is one of the signal families covered by The Alternative Data Encyclopedia, with 23 providers and 438 datasets listed in the register. For how the signal is generated, its caveats and the compliance considerations, and the full provider list, see the category article.
Further reading
- Alternative data for investingHow funds turn alternative data into an investment edge: signal families, evaluation, backtesting, compliance and the build-vs-buy decision, mapped to the datasets and providers indexed on this encyclopedia.