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City staff previews Placer.ai analytics, staff flag privacy questions and trial pricing
Summary
City staff demonstrated Placer.ai foot‑traffic analytics, citing a FreedomFest count of about 6,500 and a vendor offer of $9,000 for year one and $11,000 for year two; staff said the tool could help target retail recruitment but raised privacy and licensing questions that require follow‑up.
Speaker 1 (unidentified speaker) presented a Placer.ai demonstration and recommended further testing of the foot‑traffic analytics product to support economic development and retail recruitment.
The presentation showed the tool’s ability to estimate event attendance — Speaker 1 said Placer.ai indicated about 6,500 visitors to last year’s FreedomFest — and highlighted retail leakage estimates that staff interpreted as a roughly $26,000,000 local sales gap, which the presentation translated into about $650,000 in lost sales tax. Speaker 1 said the vendor offered trial pricing: $9,000 for the first year and $11,000 for the second year, with the city able to request multiple accounts and vendor support for reports.
Why this matters: staff argued the analytics could help the city target businesses that would recapture lost sales and better focus scarce economic‑development resources. Speaker 2 noted the product is used by large retailers and that the data can show where local residents are already shopping.
City officials also flagged privacy and licensing issues. Speaker 1 said, "this is anonymous, but someone somewhere has a non anonymous data entry thing, that is incredibly scary," noting concern about how anonymized device data could be used. Staff proposed clarifying which city staff and external partners would have access and whether business owners could obtain their own accounts.
No formal purchase decision was recorded. Staff said they would schedule additional vendor demos (including a deeper demonstration for staff and a joint demo with the city’s economic‑development team) and would clarify licensing, account access, privacy parameters and budget implications before returning to the board.
