Density measurement that ships counts, not identities
A passive Wi-Fi pedestrian sensor with on-device aggregation. Device identifiers never leave the Collector; only aggregate counts do. 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.
Or read the DPO Technical Note (PDF), the artefact a council DPO reads first.
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.
Device identifiers never leave the Collector.
Not hashed, not salted: discarded at each aggregation-window close. 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.
Established 1994.
Visual Solutions (UK) Ltd has been operating continuously since 1994. Procurement-grade due-diligence, not a fresh-vehicle startup.
The curve we publish.
Modern phones rotate the addresses they broadcast every few minutes (a deliberate Apple/Google privacy feature). A Collector that respects that rotation, rather than trying to defeat it, systematically overcounts unique devices at longer windows. We publish the inflation factor for every window we report. Density and trend are reliable; the absolute number is never overclaimed.
Five lanes, one Collector.
Same architecture, same privacy posture, same honesty on accuracy. Pick the lane that fits your buyer.
Councils & BIDs
Hosted footfall data subscription. No customer hardware. A defensible alternative for any authority that needs numbers it can publish.
View →Pubs & venues
Always-on density sensing for pub groups, gastropubs, multi-site hospitality. Priced for the operator, not the agency.
View →Retail & high street
Honest density for SMB retail, market stalls, kiosks. Sub-£500 per site per year. Zone and outside-catchment signal cameras can't deliver.
View →Workplaces
Building pulse without the bossware. Floor and zone density for HVAC, cleaning, ESG and capacity planning, in the works-council era.
View →Media networks
Site-level audience density for OOH and DOOH network owners. Independent evidence to back rate cards and planner conversations: density and dwell, not impressions.
View →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.
Talk to us
Free 60-day pilot for qualifying organisations. Self-install in minutes. Data live within the hour.