TraffickCam

12-7-2016

An initiative from the United States: TraffickCam. This app enables you to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms you stay in when you travel. TraffickCam asks travellers to take photos of their entire room, the bathroom, the bed and details such as carpeting and furniture. The Police Department can use the data to cross-reference against suspicious images taken by sex traffickers.

TraffickCam: crowdsourced photo database to fight sex trafficking

Traffickers regularly post photographs of their victims posed in hotel rooms for online advertisements. These photographs are evidence that can be used to find and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. In order to use these photos, however, investigators must be able to determine where the photos were taken. TraffickCam creates a database of hotel room images at which the Police Department and investigators can efficiently search, in order to find other images that were taken in the same location as an image that is part of an investigation.

The project was created by the Exchange Initiative in 2015 with help from programming researchers at the University of Washington in St. Louis.

Website: TraffickCam

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