A FOIA request by the Richmond Times-Dispatch revealed that Richmond’s Parks and Recreation department is engaged in a three-year agreement dating to 2024 with Placer.ai, a locational analytics platform that gathers cellphone geolocation data and sells it to governments, small businesses and large corporations.
City spokeswoman Tamara Jenkins said that the city uses the data to help determine how to best allocate public resources.
By exploring how often people are frequenting public parks and correlations between events that might be driving them there, Jenkins said the data informs the city’s choices on “planning, staffing, grant writing, maintenance and capital maintenance forecasting purposes.”
“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,” the newspaper reported.
While the data can also point to people’s demographics and where they may have gone after visiting a park, the newspaper said Jenkins stressed that information is for Parks and Recreation use only and not shared with Richmond police or other investigative entities.
Staffer R.J Hottovy told the newspaper that the platform can track how many people access certain areas over given periods of time and track movement profiles, but it can’t determine exactly who people are because the platform doesn’t collect personal information.
Without legal standards, Christopher Newport University professor Steven Keener warned The Times-Dispatch, people can only take private companies’ word on how their data may or may not be protected.
“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,” Keener said, “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.”
Email Richmond City Council at:
Andrew Breton: andrew.breton@rva.gov,
Katherine Jordan: katherine.jordan@rva.gov,
Kenya Gibson: kenya.gibson@rva.gov,
Sarah Abubaker: sarah.abubaker@rva.gov,
Stephanie Lynch: stephanie.lynch@rva.gov,
Ellen Robertson: ellen.robertson@rva.gov,
Cynthia Newbille: cynthia.newbille@rva.gov,
Reva Trammell: reva.trammell@rva.gov,
Nicole Jones: nicole.jones@rva.gov,
