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Human traffickers commonly advertise children for sex using explicit pictures taken from inside hotel rooms. These photos are easy to find on the Internet. The challenge for law enforcement is figuring out where the photos were taken.
That’s where the general public may now be able to help by taking pictures of their hotel rooms when traveling. The concept is simple. A hotel guest takes photos of the room from as many as four different angles and uploads them through an app. The photos, tagged with their specific location, are then added to a massive database of rooms that law enforcement can compare against photos they find on the Internet of children. Developed by researchers at Washington University in conjunction with the Exchange Initiative, a nonprofit working on solutions for ending sex trafficking, the TraffickCam app aims to help police narrow down a list of possible locations where the trafficker took the photo of a child being sold for sex. Then, the police can upload that photo to the app and compare it against the photos uploaded by the traveling public. Chicago Tribune © July 2016 |
Source: TraffickCam Articles