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.

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