SafeGraph

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][3].

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]