Wildwood committee approves demos to test geofencing and mobility data for retail planning

The Wildwood Economic Development Committee approved staff proposals to run pilot demos of aggregated mobility and device‑analytics tools to inform retail recruitment and retention.

Staff member (S2) described how geofencing and device‑ID lookback tools can quantify daytime population, measure dwell time and reveal whether visitors come from neighboring communities. The department suggested sampling Dierbergs Town Center and Wildwood Crossing as test cases and noted vendors sometimes provide free or limited-case demonstrations.

"You can put a radius around it. It can tell you how many cell phones are there at any given time ... and how long that cell phone was there," the staff member said, describing potential uses to show, for example, how an anchor store’s traffic spills over to neighboring small businesses.

Committee members raised privacy and transparency concerns. One member (S4) cautioned about how the city would describe the tool to residents: "I think we need to be very confident, be able to tell people we don't know who you are," he said, urging strict guardrails and public explanation that data are aggregated and not personally identifiable.

Staff acknowledged NDAs and state data restrictions for sales‑tax contributions and proposed limited pilots and strong demo questions to test privacy settings. The committee voted to proceed with evaluating platforms, run demos, and return with sample data at a future meeting.

Next steps: staff will request vendor demos, emphasize privacy guardrails during evaluation, and provide sample results to the committee for further guidance.