KENILWORTH – Ice rinks in Mapleton and Minto have cameras that stream video footage of hockey games and other activities, but the same service will not be coming to arenas in Wellington North.
Council recently considered signing an agreement with the LiveBarn streaming platform, similar to agreements already in place in the other northern Wellington municipalities, but decided not to do so due to privacy concerns.
The LiveBarn partnership was first considered during a July 28 meeting, when council asked township staff for clarification on privacy protections.
Township staff presented the clarification on Sept. 8, but the information provided was not enough to quell some councillors’ concerns. So a motion to sign an agreement with Livebarn was defeated, with councillors Sherry Burke, Lisa Hern and Penny Renken opposed, while councillor Steve McCabe and Mayor Andy Lennox voted in favour.
“I’m very uneasy with this platform with regard to privacy issues,” Burke said during the September meeting.
Burke asked who would be liable if a security breach occurred, and Wellington North recreation manager Mandy Jones said she could not answer that question.
LiveBarn would have possession of the recordings, not the township, she noted, which means if a Freedom of Information request was submitted, it would need to go through LiveBarn, not Wellington North.
Jones and township clerk Karren Wallace met with LiveBarn’s chief operating officer and senior manager of operations.
Township staff also met with local minor hockey associations.
Jones said two of the three minor hockey associations confirmed that all of its players’ parents have signed off on the necessary release forms to permit the video recordings.
Players whose parents are not willing to sign this release are not allowed to play, Jones said.
That’s the case regardless of whether LiveBarn streaming is offered in Wellington North, as it is already set up at other arenas the teams play at, and because parents often film and share footage from games and practices.
If LiveBarn were to be installed at the arenas, signs would have to be posted informing people that they are entering a facility with livestreaming capabilities, Jones said.
And the cameras would be scheduled to turn off whenever there were people using the ice who did not agree to the video coverage.
There was an incident in Waterloo where the cameras were accidently recording during one of these scheduled “black out” periods.
Jones said she and Wallace spoke with the LiveBarn chief operating official about this.
“They were able to get in (and) turn the cameras off right away. They confirmed that nobody had viewed or downloaded the footage,” she said.
“So they would be able to provide us with that information as well if something like that were to happen.”
Hern said while she understands the benefit of the streaming platform, she feels “really uncomfortable with the privacy aspect of it.
“Even with the safeguards in place what I’m worried about is how a vulnerable child feels … They’re possibly already in a precarious situation that neither of us can fathom and I’m very uncomfortable with giving them one more layer of uncomfortableness.”
Mayor Andy Lennox said he’s comforted by the fact black out periods would not apply to individual teams or games within hockey associations, as he was worried about the margin of error imagining coaches needing to turn the cameras on and off regularly.
With each association opting in or out entirely, Lennox said it seems to be more of a “robust process.”
