Starbucks To Ban Porn On Free Wi-Fi

Customers will no longer be able to drink their coffee and watch porn at the same time at Starbucks (SBUX) as the company will be placing filters on its free Wi-Fi.

Starbucks plans to block porn sites at all of its U.S. stores by next year, according to Business Insider. While the coffee chain has always prohibited pornographic content on its free Wi-Fi, it never had the filers in place to actually block it, the news outlet said.

“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,” the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed. “We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores, and we will begin introducing it to our US locations in 2019.”

Starbucks told Business Insider that while it doesn’t have a permanent solution in place, it has tested a number of tools designed to prevent accidentally blocking websites that are inoffensive.

The move to block porn sites on its Wi-Fi service comes from years of pressure from internet safety nonprofit Enough Is Enough. The organization also worked with McDonald’s to add content filters to its free Wi-Fi in 2016, according to Business Insider.

Starbucks finally caved in to the pressure from Enough Is Enough since promising the organization that it would also ban porn on its free Wi-Fi in 2016, the news outlet reported. The organization sent a petition to Starbucks demanding that it stop allowing access to porn sites, which was signed by 26,000 people on Thursday, Business Insider said.

As of this afternoon, Starbucks stock was up 0.25 percent to 66.99.