Human trafficking is a major problem around the world. TraffickCam is an app that could help the police to find human traffickers more easy. How this app works is easy. You just install it and whenever you are travelling and you are in your hotel room, you take some pictures and then upload them in the TrafficCam database.
The children traffickers for example usually advertise the children for sex using explicit pictures taken inside hotel rooms and more than that kids are even bought and sold in hotel rooms too. These pictures are compared by the police with the pictures submitted by the travellers using the app, for a better chance of finding out where the explicit pictures of the victims were taken.
TraffickCam app was developed by the Washington University Researcher Abby Stylianou in collaboration with Exchange Initiative, a non-profit organization formed by Nix Conference and Meeting Management, which already helped the police to identify a hotel room where a victim was trafficked. “It was a photo that they had from the internet,” Nix Principal Molly Hackett said. “One of the girls in our office knew exactly what it was.”
You just enter your hotel room, and your room number. You take four pictures, and you submit them to the website. And then those become part of the pipeline that law enforcement can use to track down where the victims are being trafficked, said the developer.
The app was launched on 20 June 2016, it was downloaded more than 56,000 times and it already gathered 1,5 million images of hotel rooms from around the world.
You can download TraffickCam app for free and it is available for IOS and Android devices.