TraffickCam needs four photos of your empty hotel room to track down victims
4 Agustus 2016 13:21
Brilio.net/en - For some of us, taking photo of the hotel room once we arrivecan be a ritual, to share the excitement with our family and friends or on social media. But for some people, the photos you take can make a big difference. An app calledTraffickCamis using those photosto combat sex trafficking.
So, how does it work?
First, you can download the app for free on your mobile device, either iOS or Android phone, or just open it up on yourwebbrowser. Once you are checked in a hotel or motel, take up to four pictures of the entire room from different angles. The web suggests a picture of the bed from the foot and a picture of the bathroom from the doorway. These photos will be then published under a Creative Commons license.Thenpolice will use them to cross-reference with photos pulled from sex-trafficking cases.
The system can help the authorities to track down victims more easily by narrowing their search. Identifying features likepatterns in the carpet, furniture, room accessories and window views can be analyzed, and according to the apps creators, testing shows it is 85 percent accurate atidentifying the correct hotel in the top 20 matches.
Sex trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that forces children and adults to engage in sexual acts, for money, against their will. UNICEF saysthe problem is much bigger than you might think; at least 300,000 American children, and more than 1.2 million children worldwide are trafficked every year.
Sgt. Adam Kavanaugh of the St. Louis County Police leads the Missouri Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and says the average age, when we talk to our girls that we deal with, most of them have started at 13, 14 years old. I think its going to be crucial to help us identify not only where theyre at now, but where theyve been at. Which is something we need thats helps with prosecution.
TraffickCam is a crowd-sourced data app that was launched by the Exchange Initiative on June 20.It hasalready reached more than 50,000 downloads with an estimated 1,700 new photos uploaded every day from over 145,000 hotels in the US.
Nix Conference & Meeting Management created this app in 2015 to help bring an end to sex trafficking around the world with real resources. They are a group of people who are committed to combating commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and one of 13 companies in the US and 43 worldwide honored as a 2014 top member by the internationally recognized Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct (TheCode.org).
For now, their mission is to provide resources, information and networking solutions to combat sex trafficking in the US. But in time they will expand their reach worldwide. We might not realize how much we help, but just using the app help raise awareness ofcrimes that could behappening before our own eyes.
