Key Takeaways
- SafeGraph sells factual data about physical Places, Geometry, and Address, never data about individuals.
- No personal identifiers, device IDs, mobility or foot traffic tracking, and no law enforcement customers, ever.
- Full schema and monthly release notes, including known errors, are public at docs.safegraph.com.
- Data powers research, logistics, real estate, adtech, government, and healthcare, including 700+ academic papers since 2020.
- Sensitive place categories, like health clinics, get only what the location already makes public: address and hours.
SafeGraph does not sell data to law enforcement and does not offer mobility or foot traffic tracking of individuals.SafeGraph sells factual data about physical places: where a business is located, when it’s open, and the shape of the building it sits in. It does not collect or sell data about individual people, and it never has.
This page exists because prospects, journalists, and legal or procurement teams keep asking the same fair question: what’s actually in SafeGraph’s data, and what isn’t? Below is the direct answer, along with the schema, sourcing rules, and use cases behind it.
What’s actually in SafeGraph data
SafeGraph builds three core datasets, and each one describes a place, never a person.
Places
SafeGraph Places covers 80 million-plus points of interest worldwide, spanning 15,000+ brands and 900+ categories. Each record includes a business’s name, address, category, brand affiliation, hours of operation, and opened or closed dates. The dataset refreshes monthly, so it answers basic factual questions: where a business is, what kind of business it is, and when it’s open. See the full Places product page or the public Places schema for every available field.
Geometry
SafeGraph Geometry captures the physical shape of a place instead of a single coordinate. Each polygon is delivered in Well-Known Text (WKT) format with spatial hierarchy metadata showing how a place relates to nearby buildings, floors, or parking lots. This is what makes it possible to tell a customer inside a store apart from a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Details are in the Geometry product page and the Geometry schema.
Address
SafeGraph Address is a structured, geocoded address dataset covering 35+ countries, with particular depth in markets where reliable address data is historically hard to find. Every record is parsed into discrete fields (street, city, region, postal code) and paired with precise latitude and longitude, ready for bulk validation or routing. See the Address product page and the geocoded address schema.
Dataset | What it contains | Example fields |
Places | Point of interest records for businesses and organizations worldwide | Business name, category, brand ID, hours, open/close dates |
Geometry | Building footprint polygons and spatial relationships | Polygon shape (WKT), spatial hierarchy, parking attributes |
Address | Structured, geocoded address records | Street, city, region, postal code, latitude/longitude |
What SafeGraph data does not include
- No personal data : No names, phone numbers, emails, or other identifiers tied to an individual consumer.
- No device IDs : No mobile advertising IDs, device identifiers, or app-level tracking data.
- No mobility or foot traffic tracking : Places, Geometry, and Address contain no visit counts, dwell times, or movement patterns tied to individuals.
- No law enforcement customers : SafeGraph does not sell data to law enforcement agencies.
Who uses SafeGraph data
Research
SafeGraph data has powered 700+ academic papers since 2020, including work from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M. Academic access now runs through the Dewey partnership; browse the work on the academic research page.
Logistics
SafeGraph maintains detailed data on warehouses, distribution centers, ports, and depots, which logistics teams use to plan routes and understand supply chain bottlenecks. Sysco, for example, uses SafeGraph Places data to track market and brand shifts across a changing economy.
Local Search
Mapping and search platforms use Places data to plot businesses accurately and power queries like “coffee shops near me.” Accurate category tagging and up-to-date hours are what make that kind of search result trustworthy. Read more in the guide to sourcing POI data for maps and search.
Real Estate
Retailers and commercial real estate firms use SafeGraph data for site selection, from picking a new store location to evaluating acquisition targets. Avison Young uses SafeGraph data to deliver ground-level insights for commercial real estate decisions.
Adtech
SafeGraph’s advertising customers are concentrated in out-of-home (OOH), where the data helps plan ad placements and enforce compliance, such as keeping alcohol ads away from schools. Clear Channel Europe uses SafeGraph data to fuel more targeted OOH campaigns.
Government
City and state governments use SafeGraph data for urban planning, transportation, and understanding food access. One example: SafeGraph data helped the public sector measure the walkability of urban areas. SafeGraph does not have law enforcement customers.
Healthcare
Healthcare organizations use Places and Geometry data for care-site planning and logistics. Socially Determined uses SafeGraph data to advance research into the social determinants of public health.
How we handle sensitive place categories
SafeGraph publishes the same categories of factual information about every point of interest, regardless of what type of place it is. That includes location types that are widely understood to be sensitive, such as health clinics, religious institutions, or family planning centers.
For these categories, the rule is simple and applies uniformly, not case by case: SafeGraph includes only information the location has already made public itself, typically its address and hours of operation, the same details a visitor would find on the organization’s own website or in a public directory. SafeGraph does not publish, infer, or sell any data about who visits a location, regardless of its category.
This standard isn’t a one-time decision. As new edge cases come up, SafeGraph applies the same principle rather than making exceptions, and continues to revisit the policy as the data landscape evolves.
Transparency Commitments
- Public schema
The full Places, Geometry, and Address schemas are documented at docs.safegraph.com, including every field and how it’s defined. - Monthly release notes
Known errors, fixes, and coverage changes are published every month in the changelog. - Self-serve access
Anyone can browse the data and request free samples through SafeGraph’s free data library. - Academic program
Free access for researchers and academics runs through the Dewey partnership, and the resulting work, 700+ papers since 2020, is documented on the academic research page.
Closing Thoughts
None of this is new for SafeGraph, it’s the same principle the company has operated on since shifting to place-based data in 2018: build facts about physical places, publish exactly how those facts are sourced, and stay out of the business of tracking people. The specifics evolve (new categories, new markets, new partnerships like Dewey), but the boundary between “data about a place” and “data about a person” hasn’t moved. That’s the boundary this page is here to document.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What kind of data does SafeGraph sell?
SafeGraph sells factual data about physical places, such as business locations, hours, category classifications, and building geometry. It does not sell data about individuals, device-level signals, or consumer movement patterns.
2. Does SafeGraph collect or sell personal data?
No. Places, Geometry, and Address contain information about physical locations, not people. None of them include mobility data, foot traffic data, or anything that tracks individual behavior.
3. How does SafeGraph handle sensitive place categories?
For categories like family planning centers, SafeGraph includes only publicly available facts, location and hours, the same information the organization already publishes itself. It never sells data about who visits a location.
4. Is SafeGraph data GDPR or CCPA compliant?
SafeGraph’s core datasets don’t contain personal data, which is why they fall outside GDPR and CCPA’s scope. SafeGraph confirms it hasn’t sold or shared personal information for behavioral advertising under CCPA, and it states it isn’t established in, or offering personal-data products within, the EEA or UK under GDPR. Details are in the Privacy Policy and CCPA Policy.
5. How is SafeGraph different from foot traffic or mobility data providers?
Those providers sell data built around device movement, visit counts, or dwell time tied to individuals. SafeGraph’s core products don’t include any of that, they describe what a place is and where it is, not who goes there.
6. How often is SafeGraph data updated?
Monthly, across Places, Geometry, and Address. Openings and closures are typically reflected the same month they’re detected.
