Taking photos inside the hotel room can help fighting human trafficking across the country.
Kimberly Ritter, one of the founders of a new app called TraffickCam stated, "Sex trafficking is the dirty little secret no one wants to talk about, it's everywhere in every city, it's in your backyard, it's in the hotel you're staying in."
This app was developed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Exchange Initiative, a nonprofit formed by Nix Conference and Meeting Management.
It uses crowd-sourced photos taken inside hotel rooms to track down pimps and child sex victims in all 50 states.
Ritter said, "ECPAT-USA will tell you that 45 percent of sex trafficking happens in hotels". Through the app, TraffickCam users can anonymously upload four photos from inside their hotels, two of them should be of the entire room from different positions, one of the bed, and one of the bathroom.
Ritter informed, "Many victims have posted online, the pictures of the bathroom of hotels." The photos should be sent to a national database that uses computer image analysis to help law enforcement to locate child sex victims by matching images posted on escort advertisements or sites like backpage.com.
Ritter said that, "It populates the most probable hotel room that the victim's in, we're running on 85 percent accuracy." The app has more than 1.6 million photos taken from publicly available sources like Expedia.com, but according to Ritter they need the public co-operation to make an impact. She added, "this is something anyone can do to help fight this fight. The more photos the better, the more chance we have to rescue quicker and recognize the hotel room, [the better]."
Denver's FBI Innocence Lost Task Force, which focuses on child sex trafficking, said that this new app and anything that helps track down perpetrators is valuable to agents.
The FBI informed that more than 2,000 children are sold for sex each year in Colorado. TraffickCam is available to download for free on both Apple and Android phones.
By Prakriti Neogi
