Kewanee city officials have shelved a plan to hire a company to gather data on cell phone use in the city after a swift and immediate pushback by Kewanee residents.
At the close of the City Council’s Aug. 12 meeting, City Manager Gary Bradley reported that he wanted to hire a company called Placer AI to provide data on cell phone locations in the city. He said the data collection would be anonymous and wouldn’t involve any personal information on cellphone users.
Consideration of hiring Placer AI for $15,000 was to have been on Monday’s agenda.
But in his memo to the City Council in advance of the meeting, Bradley wrote that “The social media reaction to the potential use of AI in our economic planning efforts was strong.”
Online comments on reports of the Placer AI plan were numerous. . .and mostly negative.
“As useful as the software may be,” Bradley wrote, “it isn’t worth it at the expense of alienating such a large segment of the population, even to the extent that some of them are just misinformed on what’s being collected and the fact that they’ve already given permission for the information to be collected and sold.”
Bradley added, “With both Peoria and Moline using the service, it’s likely that the same information is collected and sold each time the complainants travel to either city.”
Bradley concluded that the data-gathering plan is “not something staff is looking to pursue at this time unless directed to do so.”
