You won’t be able to watch a skin flick with your morning latte at Starbucks anymore: the coffee chain says it’ll join McDonald’s in adding a pornography filter to its in-store WiFi.
A group called Enough Is Enough and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation had asked the two restaurant chains to block access to pornographic content over the concern that children could come across explicit content while at Starbucks or McDonald’s, either by accident or by trying to elude filters on their at-home networks.
Last week, McDonald’s said it had put filters in place at its 14,000 U.S. locations, and it was joined soon after by Starbucks — though the change has yet to roll out.
“Once we determine that our customers can access our free WiFi in a way that also doesn’t involuntarily block unintended content, we will implement this in our stores,” said a Starbucks spokesperson in a statement via CNNMoney [warning: link contains autoplay video]. “In the meantime, we reserve the right to stop any behavior that interferes with our customer experience, including what is accessed on our free WiFi.”
“This is a huge victory,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough Is Enough. “We’re proud of Starbucks and McDonald’s for stepping up to the plate. Internet pornography is a public health crisis. Parents need to know which family restaurants are safe from online threats.”
Though there aren’t any statistics on how often these chains’ networks are used to access porn, Hughes says there have been news reports about public wifi spots being used to traffic child pornography and the sexual solicitation of children, crimes that are “difficult to deter because of the anonymity offered by open WiFi.”
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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