Starbucks, thank you for putting the safety of children first by agreeing to filter out harmful sexually violent images from your public Wi-Fi! Once completed, you will join McDonalds and Tim Horton’s as leaders in the food services sector in Canada for having good filtering software on your public Wi-Fi.
We encourage you to quickly implement the necessary filtering so that our children stay safe and predators are stopped. While many parents use safety measures in the home to protect their children from Internet dangers, the parental control safeguards can be easily bypassed by children when using Starbuck’s unfiltered WIFI service, immediately exposing them to Internet dangers.
In addition to the harms to children, adults may also access and freely view pornographic material in Starbucks stores. This behaviour can expose other customers, including children to unwanted sexually explicit images. Also, sexual predators can access child pornography through the current open Wi-Fi in Canadian Starbucks stores.
Today’s internet pornography is misogynistic and violent, fueling rape culture and desensitizing the viewer. Because internet pornography is easily accessible and available, it consequently poses one of the biggest threats to our children’s online safety.
Congratulations Starbucks!
Starbucks Official Statement – July 15, 2016
We are in the process of evaluating a global protocol to address this in all of our company owned stores, and are in active discussions with organizations on implementing the right, broad-based solution that would remove any illegal and other egregious content.
“Once we determine that our customers can access our free wi-fi in a way that also doesn’t involuntarily block unintended content, we will implement this in our stores.
“In the meantime, we reserve the right to stop any behavior that interferes with our customer experience, including what is accessed on our free wi-fi, as part of our commitment to ensuring that our stores remain a safe and welcoming environment”
– Starbucks Spokesperson.