Old Town residents and elected officials recently got a first look at a plan to use a location-tracking service to inform marketing and event decisions. But some balked at the idea of using data collected from the cell phones of residents and visitors, citing privacy and ethical concerns.
The city is considering using Placer.ai to have more accurate foot traffic and movement data for businesses and city marketing to use. Caribou already uses the service and Brewer used it last year.
Placer, based in Israel with offices in the United States, collects data from smartphones of people in a specific area. The service uses a geofence — a virtual boundary around a physical location — to understand how people move through a space, where they went before and where they go afterwards.
Similar services, including StreetLight data and MapZot.ai, are used widely in business and research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Placer was frequently cited in news articles on whether workers were returning to their offices. Using a combination of cell phone data and publicly available information, Placer claims that it can give its customers a detailed understanding of people in a target area, including their movements, spending habits and median income.
In Maine, a handful of cities have used it or, like Old Town, are considering using it for a broad range of activities under the umbrella of economic development.
Caribou city officials used it to understand how popular city events are and how businesses could better succeed in the area by showing traffic trends. Brewer officials previously used the service for similar purposes.
Brewer Economic Development Director D’arcy Main-Boyington said the service was used to compare how events like Riverfest were attended last year compared to previous years based on data Placer was already collecting before the city bought its services.
Businesses in Brewer were also able to compare their crowd sizes and traffic to businesses in other cities even if those areas didn’t subscribe to Placer, Main-Boyington said.
She said the service was extremely useful because it gathered information that the city staff could not.
Placer gets its data through software development kits in already-installed mobile apps. Kits from Placer include specific agreements that allow the company to collect data from its app partners to create the location data, according to the company’s website.
The company is able to do this through user agreements and terms and conditions within the apps that people agree to when they download or use them.
However most people don’t know what they’re agreeing to. A Pew Research Center study from 2019 found that just 9 percent of Americans say they always read end user license agreements while 74 percent either never or rarely read them.
Placer doesn’t disclose exactly what data it collects. Matt Dube, associate professor of data science at the University of Maine at Augusta, said that is “concerning” and should change how people look at agreeing to an app’s terms.
“Part of what we have to think about is this notion that we are signing away data for one thing and it winds up going to another. We should always assume that when [apps] request these things, it’s going to be used beyond what they’re asking to use it for,” Dube said.
Placer claims the data it receives is already stripped of any identifiable information. The company then aggregates data from at least 50 devices in a given location, which it says adds an additional layer of anonymity. Locations with fewer than 50 unique devices will not appear within the data, according to the website.
The service uses the anonymized data in combination with demographic data such as the information from the Census Bureau to determine information about race, gender, age and income.
The company says it doesn’t knowingly collect data from minors or at locations deemed “sensitive” including military facilities, places of worship, preK-12 schools, rehabilitation centers or women’s health facilities, a policy the company adopted after it was found that Placer’s data was revealing heat maps showing when people were visiting Planned Parenthood locations in California in 2022.
Main-Boyington said city officials in Brewer talked about the ethical concerns of using Placer before entering the contract but didn’t see any risk to individual citizen’s data because of how the service aggregates the data.
E.J. Roach, director of economic and community development in Old Town, expressed confidence in Placer and how the company protects personal data, and said the service is worth the $5,000 price tag.
Nevertheless, Old Town citizens and councilors voiced concerns about the ethics of how Placer purchases data and uses it even if people can opt out. Residents would have to opt out of location tracking of every app that Placer uses in its dataset to not be included.
Dube noted that flashlight or weather apps could be selling data to Placer for its service.
The American Civil Liberties Union said Placer is one of multiple companies that are not being regulated as closely as they should be.
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, called Placer part of a “corrupt system” that buys an individual’s private information even if it becomes anonymized.
Services like this are not illegal, but are something that Congress should be addressing to protect citizens’ data, Stanley said. He advised local communities against buying into a service like Placer that deals in personal data even if it is currently legal.
Dube acknowledged that services like Placer are valuable for the businesses that are in the community. “But the question is, what kinds of privacy risks are you willing to undertake to have that?” he said.
