Taking pictures of your next hotel room could be a small step in helping victims of sex trafficking around the world. A new app and website called TraffickCam allows travelers to upload pictures of hotel rooms around the world to a database where the photos are matched against a police database.
“You just enter your hotel room, and your room number. You take four pictures, and you submit them to the website,” Washington University Researcher and TraffickCam developer Abby Stylianou said at a Human Trafficking Town Hall. “And then those become part of the pipeline that law enforcement can use to track down where the victims are being trafficked.”
“Right now there are pictures posted every day. Hundreds of pictures, in every city around the United States, posted online, that show victims of trafficking, in hotel rooms posed on beds,” she said.
The idea came about from police asking for help to identify a hotel room where a person was trafficked—someone was able to identify the room from the photo.
So, the next time you check in to a hotel room, take some photos of the hotel room and upload them after you update your Snap story.
The app is free and available for iOS and Android devices.
