TraffickCam is an innovative free app that is designed so that anyone with a smart phone can join the fight against human sex trafficking. All one needs to do is upload pictures of their hotel room (no people!) and leave the rest to TraffickCam and law enforcement.
Hotels are often venues for commercial sex trade, too many times involving minors. Traffickers often post pictures of their victims posing in hotel rooms for advertising. These photos can be used to help find the victims as well as for evidence against the perpetrator if police can find where the pictures were taken from.
TraffickCam is a free app designed to help law enforcement in this fight. It can be downloaded for free onto any smart phone. From there, the public is asked to upload four pictures of their hotel room at various angles according to instructions, as well as the name and room number of the hotel. No personal information is collected.
The app verifies the location with GPS and adds the photos to a very large database of hotel images. Features of the room are converted into a series of data points that can be matched to online photos advertising sex trafficking using image analysis technology.
So far, the app has been downloaded over 90,000 times! There are over 150,000 hotels in the database including over 1.6 million photos. Let’s all do our part and help law enforcement. With this app, help requires very little effort and potential rewards are great.
Take Action: Download TraffickCam for Adroid devices at Google Play. Download TraffickCam for iPhone and iPad at the App Store.
Next time you stay at a hotel, use the app to take and submit photos to law enforcement to help fight sex trafficking.