In its early years, SafeGraph sold direct access to individualized location traces tied to gadget IDs. SafeGraph has traditionally denied any hyperlinks to regulation enforcement. “Contrary to some belief, we don’t have any law enforcement customers,” Hoffman, the founder, wrote in 2022. However, this type of knowledge, bought by different distributors, has reportedly been bought by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and native police. 

In 2019, it spun off a subsidiary firm known as Veraset, which took over SafeGraph’s relationships with knowledge suppliers, similar to apps and different knowledge brokers, and its enterprise promoting individualized knowledge. The SafeGraph model then shifted to promoting aggregated and processed merchandise primarily based partially on Veraset’s uncooked knowledge.

The AFWERX contract is the primary publicly reported relationship between SafeGraph and the US army, however the firm has a historical past of working with different authorities companies. In 2018, it sold two years of uncooked knowledge to the Illinois Department of Transportation. In the primary months of the Covid-19 pandemic, it inked a $420,000 take care of the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, Veraset gave raw, individualized data about thousands and thousands of individuals to the Washington, DC, Department of Health and different companies across the nation. And in 2020 and 2021, Santa Clara County used SafeGraph knowledge to monitor attendance at an area church as a part of a broader effort to implement Covid restrictions. Materials shared with the Air Force point out relationships with the US Department of Agriculture, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Los Angeles County, New York City, and New Jersey governments. 

SafeGraph has additionally proven curiosity within the homeland safety enterprise. In 2022, it cosponsored the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement’s Homeland Security Week, a commerce present and expo that connects safety contractors with high federal and native regulation enforcement officers. In a joint video presentation with Department of Homeland Security contractor GoTenna, a SafeGraph consultant marketed “strategic intelligence” to assist border patrol brokers monitor US “points of entry” and areas that may’t be watched in different methods. 

In May 2022, Vice revealed that SafeGraph was promoting entry to aggregated counts of the place individuals have been earlier than and after visiting abortion clinics, together with Planned Parenthood. In response, 14 US senators sent the company a letter demanding solutions about its enterprise practices, and SafeGraph promised to cease promoting knowledge about abortion clinic guests.

Although SafeGraph is greatest recognized for dealing in cell-phone-based location knowledge, its pitch to the Air Force makes little point out of knowledge about human motion—the one direct reference is a slide that claims it could possibly assist “analyze human activity for Landing Zone (LZ) selection,” with out explaining what which means. But SafeGraph has lately expanded its enterprise to include other forms of knowledge as effectively. For instance, in 2022, it launched Spend, a product that profiles the shoppers of brick-and-mortar shops, together with what they spend, what wi-fi carriers they use, and whether or not they take out short-term “buy now, pay later” loans. 

In its slide deck for the Air Force, SafeGraph additionally claims to make use of a “global language model” in a position to “ingest data from 193 countries” and “100+ languages” to enhance its knowledge about bodily locations utilizing “web-crawling and Machine Learning.” In response to a query about excellent challenges, it mentioned it plans to construct “deeper language models” to assist it collect knowledge about locations of curiosity to the Air Force, such because the Middle East.

SafeGraph is funded partially by the CIA-backed enterprise capital agency In-Q-Tel, and In-Q-Tel head of investments George Hoyem sits on SafeGraph’s board, in response to its slide deck. SafeGraph has additionally received investments from a motley crew together with Peter Thiel, Sam Harris, former Republican House majority chief Eric Cantor, and former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud. SafeGraph’s final funding spherical valued the corporate at $370 million, in response to the data.

In a post-contract questionnaire, SafeGraph advised AFWERX it had met eight occasions with numerous components of the Air Force to debate the usage of its merchandise. It now plans to use for a bigger Phase 2 contract with the Air Force within the third quarter of 2023, focusing on Task Force 99 of the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The data additionally point out the potential for a facility safety clearance, which might enable SafeGraph to entry categorised info instantly.