I recently went on a family beach trip down to Destin, Florida. It’s hard to beat the Emerald Coast — sugar-white sand squeaking under your feet, the gulf catching completely clear, green-blue gradients, and the sound of waves hitting the shore. Except, there was a problem.
When we arrived early in the morning, practically zero people were on the beach. Yet finding a spot to actually lay down a towel was nearly impossible.
"The shoreline wasn’t filled with people. It was filled with rows of perfectly aligned, completely empty blue umbrellas and wooden chairs."
Commercial beach vendors had seemingly monopolized the entire front row of the gulf. They had come out before sunrise and "pre-set" massive, perfectly uniform corporate grids of chairs that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Families that brought their own gear were effectively walled off. You had to sit twenty yards back behind a phalanx of private rentals just to see the tops of the waves.
The irony was deafening: next to our little slice of crowded public-access sand sat a massive, wide-open expanse of completely empty beach directly in front of the resorts. But if you accidentally let your six-year-old walk over into that wide-open space? Security guards would politely point you back to the "public" zone. We were "trespassing" on the very sand we had driven twelve hours to visit.
Privatization by Proxy
Beaches are technically meant to be public below the mean high tide line in most jurisdictions. But commercial pre-setting exploits a loophole. The vendors aren’t necessarily blocking the water; they are just monopolizing the land immediately adjacent to it before anyone else can wake up, converting public commons into a private, monetized "beach club" for the day.
If you don't rent from them, you are subjected to the back rows. It's privatization by proxy.
Voting With Our Wallets, Driven By Data
At The Glass Collective, we believe that software can be a quiet utility used to improve the physical world. Sitting in the back row, trying to see my kid play by the water through the gap between two empty vendor chairs, I realized this is a data problem.
If families knew ahead of time how badly a particular municipality was compromised by commercial chair grids, they might choose to book their vacation rentals elsewhere. A drop in tourism dollars might be the only language that city councils understand when deciding whether or not to enforce "Leave No Trace" vendor ordinances.
That realization birthed the Open Sands Index™ (OSI).
We built a Progressive Web App that assigns a rigorous 0-100 score to beaches summarizing how accessible they are for independent, bring-your-own-setup visitors. And we don't rely on guesswork. The pipeline is powered by satellite intelligence — using the Google Earth Engine to pull high-resolution imagery and running a computer vision model over the coast. It detects commercial umbrella grids, calculates the ratio of sand covered, factors in regulatory local contexts, and processes natural language sentiment from hundreds of Google maps reviews talking about "public access."
The coast belongs to everyone. By quantifying precisely where it has been rented out from under our feet, we're giving power back to the independent traveler. If the vendors want to monopolize the front line, we'll map them from space.