McDonald’s filters WiFi to protect customers from porn

Published Wednesday, Jul. 13, 2016, 9:54 am Join AFP's 100,000+ followers on Facebook Purchase a subscription to AFP | Subscribe to AFP podcasts on iTunes News, press releases, letters to the editor: augustafreepress2@gmail.com Advertising inquiries: freepress@ntelos.net

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Enough Is Enough (EIE), the nation’s pioneering Internet safety organization, today praised the McDonald’s corporation® for their decision to filter public Wi-Fi from pornography and child pornography.

EIE launched its “National Porn Free Wi-Fi” campaign” in the fall of 2014, with nearly 50,000 petitions and 75 partner organizations encouraging McDonald’s and Starbucks to lead Corporate America in filtering Wi-Fi. Both companies were early adopters in the U.K., where they voluntarily filtered pornography on their public WiFi networks. McDonald’s responded rapidly and positively to the initial outreach to their CEO by EIE in spring 2014, and began exploring options for WiFi filtering. To date, Starbucks has yet to respond.

In the first quarter of 2016, McDonald’s began to implement their new filtered WiFi policy in their corporate-owned restaurants in the U.S., and made the same service available to their franchisees. While McDonald’s wasn’t aware of any pornography related incidents in their stores, their move to offer filtered WiFi is clearly one more major step in the right direction. The bottom line – the majority of McDonald’s restaurants now offer safer WiFi access for their patrons.

“Parents can have peace of mind that, when they or their children go to McDonald’s, they will have a safer and more friendly WiFi experience, filtered from pornography, from child porn and from potential sexual exploitation and predation,”said EIE President Donna Rice Hughes. “McDonald’s deserves widespread praise for this act of corporate responsibility and commitment to children and family safety.”

By proactively filtering pornography and child porn on their WiFi, McDonald’s now joins others such as Chick-fil-A and Panera Bread demonstrating their commitment to provide safe and secure WiFi resulting in a family friendly environment for all of their patrons.

“Internet safety is now the fourth top-ranked health issue for U.S. children with peer-reviewed research confirming Internet pornography as a public health crisis. There are many studies on the deleterious effects of Internet pornography on the developing brains of children and teens and the fueling role of porn on child sexual exploitation. Parents need to know which family restaurants are safe from online threats. Other companies would be wise to follow McDonald’s lead,” said Hughes.

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