TraffickCam: An app to locate the victims of sex-trafficking

I know you don’t want another app in your already jammed phone and neither am I asking you to do so. All I would like you to do is to have a look at this new app called TraffickCam and you can take your call.

TraffickCam is developed by the Exchange Initiative, an US-based organization fighting back against sex trafficking to build a national database of photos of the insides of hotel rooms to help law enforcement match images posted by sex traffickers to locations, in an effort to map out the routes and methods used by traffickers. The app will also be useful to help locate victims — and the people who put them in their predicament.

The app with a very basic design is available for both iOS and android and is expected to prove critical in fight against sex-trafficking.

Sex trafficking is a form of modern day slavery that forces children and adults to engage in sexual acts, for money, against their will. According to UNICEF, at least 300,000 American children, and more than 1.2 million children worldwide are trafficked each year. The children mentioned in this figure are between the ages 12-14.

The app is a crowd-sourced data gathering tool which can be used to match known locations to photos confiscated from or shared by the perpetrators. Features such as patterns in the carpeting, furniture, room accessories and window views can be analyzed, and according to the app’s creators, testing shows that the app is 85 percent accurate in identifying the correct hotel in the top 20 matches.

“Law enforcement is always looking for new and innovative ways to recover victims, locate suspects and investigate criminal activity,” says Sergeant Adam Kavanagh, St. Louis County Police Department and Supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force.

Today, the organization’s database contains 1.5 million photos from more than 145,000 hotels in every major metropolitan area of the U.S., a combination of photos taken by early users of the TraffickCam smartphone app and from publicly available sources of hotel room images.

The idea for the app came up when the organization found an image of a motel room, knew what city it was taken in, but had no way of knowing which motel the photo was taken in.

“We connected the vice squad with our associates in that city, but it took three days to find the girl,” said Molly Hackett at the Exchange Initiative. “That seemed way too long, given today’s technology.”

You can make your small contribution to make the world a better place with this app and help someone in need somewhere.

You can download the app here.