Starbucks says they’ve cracked a way to block pornography on their wifi networks and plan to implement it in 2019, hopefully fulfilling a two-year-old promise to ban porn from their stores.
“We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our U.S. locations in 2019,” said a company representative.
The mission to band wifi in Starbucks began back in 2014 with a group called Enough Is Enough, which petitioned both Starbucks and McDonalds to block pornography in their stores. The nonprofit maintains McDonalds responded “rapidly and positively” but Starbucks dragged their heels. By 2016, Starbucks announced it was “in active discussions with organizations on implementing the right, broad-based solution that would remove any illegal and other egregious content.”
But Enough is Enough CEO Donna Hughes wasn’t impressed. “Starbucks has had a tremendous opportunity to put its best foot forward in protecting its customers from images deemed obscene and illegal under the law, but they haven’t budged, despite their promise two years ago and despite the fact that they voluntarily filter this same content in the UK,” Hughes said in the statement.
Starbucks hasn’t released the exact details of how they’re going to block porn in their stores, and Hughes still sounds skeptical (“They won’t get an applause until they’ve actually implemented safe Wi-Fi filtering,” she told NBC News) but their announcement was enough to rattle YouPorn, one of the largest providers of free porn on the internet and, therefore, one of the biggest websites in the world. YouPorn announced they’re banning Starbucks in their own offices.
