The world’s largest chain of coffee shops, the iconic Starbucks, has long been a spot for far more than quick soy mocha latte. The nearly 30,000 Starbucks outlets have long served as hangouts for struggling screenwriters, businesspeople holding out of office meetings or just plain folk with nothing better to do than while away the hours sipping coffee and cruising the internet with the chain’s free WiFi service.
Apparently, Starbucks has also been a place where people, some people anyway, go to watch porn—presumably without utilizing their own personal IP addresses, giving their porn surfing sessions an extra degree of anonymity online.
But all that is about to change.
According to a Business Insider report on Wednesday, Starbucks will add a porn filter to their free in-store WiFi networks, starting in 2019. The move comes two years after Starbucks initially announced that it would begin blocking porn from its WiFi networks—and after years of pressure by anti-porn forces led by a group calling itself Enough Is Enough—a group led by Donna Rice Hughes, who first became famous in 1987 as the “Miami woman linked to Gary Hart,” in a scandal that led to the Colorado senator’s downfall as a presidential candidate.
The Hart-Rice scandal is the subject of the new film The Front Runner in which Hugh Jackman portrays Hart and Sarah Paxton plays Rice.
Before Starbucks announced its new porn ban, Rice claimed that the chain was “keeping the doors wide open for convicted sex offenders and others to fly under the radar from law enforcement and use free, public Wi-Fi services to access illegal child porn and hard-core pornography.”
Enough Is Enough had also circulated a petition that collected 26,000 signatures, which claimed that Starbucks was “attracting pedophiles and sex offenders,” though the evidence of significant use of Starbucks free WiFi by pedophiles downloading illegal child pornography appears not to exist.
Starbucks had already banned the viewing of porn inside its coffee shops, but had not yet taken technological steps to actually block adult sites from accessing by customers.
“While it rarely occurs, the use of Starbucks public Wi-Fi to view illegal or egregious content is not, nor has it ever been permitted,” Starbucks said in a statement to the site The Verge. “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.”
Starbucks did not release details on the content filter that it planned to implement, but told The Verge that it had tested multiple solutions for blocking porn without blocking non-porn sites as well.
The backlash against the Starbucks announcement took less than a day, with YouPorn—the free porn “tube” site owned by MindGeek, which also owns PornHub, RedTube and several other popular sites—announcing that on January 1 it would ban all Starbucks products from its corporate offices, TMZ reported, switching its in-house coffee to Dunkin’ (formerly known as Dunkin’ Donuts) instead.
Photo By Wikimedia Commons
