Crowd-Sense

Density measurement that ships counts, not identities

A passive Wi-Fi pedestrian sensor with on-device aggregation. Device identifiers are discarded on the Collector itself — only aggregate counts ever leave it. Designed for the safe-harbour described in the ICO's 2016 Wi-Fi Location Analytics guidance, and built for councils, BIDs, retailers and workplaces who need defensible footfall data in 2026.

Why Crowd-Sense

Most Wi-Fi analytics products from the past decade hash MAC addresses and retain them in a back-end database. Crowd-Sense doesn't. Identifiers are discarded on the Collector at aggregation close. There is no off-device dataset to re-balance, subpoena, or breach.

Privacy by architecture

MAC addresses never leave the Collector. Not hashed, not salted — discarded entirely. The wire payload contains no identifier of any kind.

Honest by default

We publish the MAC randomisation overcount curves. Density and trend are reliable; absolute unique-visitor counts at long windows are not, and we say so.

Self-installing

Plug into mains via USB, connect Ethernet or Wi-Fi, capture begins within minutes. No civils, no scaffolding, no specialist trade.

Hosted, no CapEx

The Collector is supplied as part of the subscription. The customer owns no hardware, maintains no hardware, replaces no hardware.

Real-time

Density at 1, 5, 15, 30 and 60-minute windows. Operational decisions made on minute-level data, not weekly batches.

Established 1994

Visual Solutions (UK) Ltd has been operating continuously since 1994. Procurement-grade due-diligence, not a fresh-vehicle startup.

The Oxfordshire moment

In January 2026 Oxfordshire County Council publicly withdrew the November 2025 Oxford congestion-charge footfall figures after a mid-2025 dataset rebalance from its supplier produced anomalies the council couldn't defend.

The lesson generalises. Any organisation that buys footfall data without understanding the methodology behind the numbers is one supplier-side change away from the same press cycle. Crowd-Sense is built to give a different answer: each Collector produces counts directly from its own local observations. There is no panel to rebalance, no third-party SDK, nothing that could change without us deliberately changing it.

What we mean by "no panel": we don't aggregate location data from mobile apps. We don't buy data from brokers. Each Collector passively listens for nearby Wi-Fi probe requests, counts them on-device, and emits aggregate bracket counts. That's the whole pipeline.

Read our published methodology and accuracy disclosure →

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