1. The TraffickCam App
First created in 2015 by the Exchange Initiative and researchers at Washington University, TraffickCam is an app that enables travelers to easily join the fight against child trafficking.
When you are staying in a hotel anywhere in the world, you can take pictures of your room before you unpack and upload them through this app. The app then cycles through these photos using technology to match it with pictures related to trafficking crimes, such as ads on sites like backpage.com or evidence that the local police departments have. Often traffickers will use photos of their victims posed in hotel rooms for online sex ads, but it is difficult to know where they are by just that single picture.
For example, the app’s technology will match the carpet print and lampshade to an online sex ad with the same carpet print and lampshade in the picture. This will create a database that can be shared among many law enforcement agencies and aid in investigations. TraffickCam also allows the general public to join the fight against trafficking as they upload pictures from wherever they are in the world.
The app protects privacy rejecting any photos that have people in it. It also can protect against fraud by matching the GPS location of the picture with the hotel you claim to be at to ensure accuracy. Also make sure you do not have any personal belongings in the picture.
TraffickCam’s Success
So far, the app has received 1.5 million pictures from 145,000 hotels. However, most of these photos have been automatically scraped from travel websites such as Expedia and TripAdvisor. With the public’s help, this group will be able to reach more hotels that traffickers are using and locate victims more quickly.
With over 250,000 child victims of trafficking in the U.S. alone, TraffickCam has potential to help find these children faster. Although the app and database have received a lot of photos from the internet, the photos that users take are more similar to the photos that traffickers take and use in ads. For more information and FAQs, visit this link. It is available on iOS and Android.
Our Rescue © August 2017