Hendersonville and Placer.ai

This is the most local example in the entire project, and the one most people will react to viscerally, because it is already happening in their backyard, without their knowledge or vote.

Source: Confirmed Primary Record

The City of Hendersonville’s own BOMA (Board of Mayor and Aldermen) meeting minutes from February 11, 2025, disclose that the city contracted with Placer.ai, an AI-based program that tracks cell phone movement, to gather data on where people in Hendersonville go, what they buy, what retail services they use, where they come from, and where they go when they leave. This is not alleged. It is in the city’s own public minutes.

From the Hendersonville BOMA Minutes

“The City has contracted with Placer.ai, an artificial intelligence based program to track cell phone movement to be integrated into data that can be shared and analyzed… it has been used to gather data where people visit in Hendersonville, use the retail services and go for recreation, to see where they are coming from and to follow trends over a three-year period.”

Placer.ai is connected to roughly 30 million U.S. mobile devices. It obtains location data via an SDK embedded in third-party mobile apps. When a device dwells in a defined area for a few minutes, it logs a “visit.” The company says data is stripped of identifiers and aggregated. Critics note aggregated location data can in some cases be re-identified, and that residents typically never voted on or were informed about such municipal contracts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has previously queried the company over its data practices.

What Is and Is Not Confirmed

Confirmed via primary source: the contract exists, the February 11, 2025 BOMA meeting took place, and the City’s Economic Development and Community Planner (J. Ritterbeck) disclosed it. Not yet independently verified: the specific contract term (three years) and dollar amount. Municipal Placer.ai contracts elsewhere run roughly $8,000 to $27,000/year. The specific Hendersonville terms should be treated as reported-but-unverified pending a public-records request.

The broader point this example makes is not about Hendersonville specifically. It is about how data collection infrastructure embeds itself into the fabric of daily civic life without public deliberation, at the municipal level, years before a data center is ever proposed nearby. This is the consumer-side of the data demand story, and it is as local as it gets.