One Million Moms: Victory Over McDonald’s Wi-Fi

Just in from the American Family Association’s censor-in-chief Monica Cole:

Dear Joe, Some victories take place within only 2 hours of letting our voice be heard while others take much longer, and that is OK.

Over a year ago, One Million Moms and AFA partnered with Enough Is Enough (EIE), an organization pioneering Internet safety, along with 75 other family organizations and encouraged McDonald’s and Starbucks to lead corporate America in filtering WiFi to be safer and more family-friendly, filtered from pornography, child porn and online threats. McDonald’s responded rapidly and positively 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 its corporate-owned restaurants in the U.S., and made the same service available to franchisees. While McDonald’s wasn’t aware of any pornography-related incidents in their stores, the move to offer filtered WiFi is clearly a major step in the right direction. The bottom line – the majority of McDonald’s restaurants now offer safer WiFi access for their patrons.

McDonald’s has been extremely cooperative and helpful, and we would like to collectively thank the company. McDonald’s has not only been a delight to work with, but listened to customer concerns.

These “family-friendly” filters tend to block JMG. Let me know if you run into that at McDonald’s.