This Bay Area City Tracks Visitors' Movements: Reports

WALNUT CREEK, CA — The next time you plan on visiting Walnut Creek for more than two hours, be sure to check your phone location settings. If you don’t, the city will automatically record that you were there, and retain the data.

Walnut Creek is the first Bay Area city to partner with Arrivalist, a travel industry company that uses mobile location data to provide the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce information on how many people visit the city for longer than two hours, and what they do once they’re there. Arrivalist provides aggregated information on how many people from outside Walnut Creek visit, how long they stay, and where they go, using WiFi signals, cell phone towers, and location tracking devices. Users are not notified that this is happening.

The Arrivalist tracking technology has already been used in Sonoma, Stockton, and some Southern cities.

At a Walnut Creek City Council meeting Tuesday, representatives from the Chamber of Commerce explained the new initiative. Nicole Hankton, the executive vice president of the chamber’s visitor’s bureau, said that the chamber is only interested in aggregated data on how many visitors came, where they came from, and where they went. For example, the technology was used to collect data about attendance at a recent girls’ basketball tournament at the Ultimate Fieldhouse.

“It’s all very innocent,” Hankton said.

Chamber President Bob Linscheid also told KRON4 and ABC7 News that no names, emails, or personal identifiers are collected, and no data is shared outside the organization. He also said it is only used for out of town devices. Still, privacy advocates are raising red flags. Mike Katz-Lacabe, the director of research for Oakland Privacy, said that even though Walnut Creek’s goals are reportedly benign, the technology has the ability to reveal deeply personal patterns over time.

“In the same manner that they're doing it to track visitors for an event in the city of Walnut Creek, you could do that for who visits a police station during the day,” Katz-Lacabe told CBS News. “Where do they go before and after they go to the police station?”

Visitors who don’t want to be tracked can adjust their tracking and location settings, according to CBS News.