Old Town’s elected officials and residents gave mixed reviews on Tuesday to the city’s plan to use a location-tracking data service. The hour-long discussion at a City Council meeting focused on how the proposed program, which has been pitched as an economic development tool, would be used.
Old Town is planning to use Placer.ai to gather foot traffic and movement data for the downtown. Placer, an Israel-based company founded in 2017, collects data from smartphones of people in a specific area. The program uses a geofence — a virtual boundary around a physical location — to understand how people move through a space and combines that with where they went before and where they go afterwards to show a larger view of movement through the community.
E.J. Roach, director of economic and community development in Old Town, said the city put up $5,000 as part of the Greater Bangor Recreation Economy for Rural Communities group with other areas, including Bangor and Brewer, putting forth funds as well. Roach said the $5,000 comes from tax-increment financing revenue and does not come from the city’s budget.
Old Town has been considering using Placer since 2022. Since then, the city has looked into the service more and feels confident in how it will be used and how data will be collected, Roach said.
“Old Town is not tracking anyone or anything. We are partnering with other communities in the Greater Bangor region to access data that is already being collected with your permission and will continue to be collected whether we subscribe to Placer.ai or not,” Roach said.
Lisa Sturgeon, chair of the Greater Bangor Recreation Economy for Rural Communities group, said Brewer has been using the program for multiple years. The group price through the Greater Bangor Recreation Economy for Rural Communities group would save Brewer $15,000 by having the other communities pay a portion.
The total cost of the service was not disclosed.
The company is able to collect this data through user agreements and terms and conditions within the apps it partners with. Users agree to share their data when they download or use them.
The company uses the anonymized data in combination with demographic data such as the information from the Census Bureau to include information about race, gender, age and income that is shared with users, according to Placer’s website.
When Placer receives the data from the apps it partners with, it is stripped of any identifiable information and aggregated with at least 50 total devices in that location to further keep anonymity of the data. The heatmaps and location information shared from this data is made up of the 50 or more devices from which data was collected. Locations with fewer than 50 unique devices will not appear within the data, according to the website.
Roach said that because of the 50 devices required by the program, events like the City Council meeting which 40 residents attended would not be tracked by the program.
Roach said he could not think of any negatives to the program.
“I want to stress again, the whole time, we’re not tracking residents or visitors with artificial intelligence,” Roach said.
Placer uses artificial intelligence to aggregate data collected, not to collect it, according to Placer’s website.
Multiple councilors questioned how useful the data would be for Old Town. Councilors Linda McLeod and Carol May asked if the city’s traffic and movement downtown would be large enough to be tracked and used usefully.
Councilor Zachary Wyles said he believes Placer would not be ethically using the data collected in Old Town and called the company a data broker.
Placer states that it does not sell data.
Councilor Charlene Virgilio also questioned how Placer would use the city’s data even if the city does not opt in.
“I don’t think there’s any guarantees with Placer that they are not going to take this data and sell it to somebody else or monetize the data that it’s really collecting that, you know, is ours,” Virgilio said.
One Old Town resident, who said she works for Downtown Bangor in marketing, said the program should be looked at as a harbinger for only potentially positive benefits.
“It is good to know that information, especially if we’re not linking it to specific individuals,” she said.
In the nearly hour-long public comment portion of Tuesday’ meeting, multiple audience members spoke against the location tracking program being funded with public money. One member said that not every person in the city would know how to opt out of the data collection if they wanted to.
Council President Christian Pushor said the city should talk to Caribou and Brewer, two communities that currently use Placer, to see the impact of the data before paying for it.