TRAFFICCAM, a new cyber solution
Child trafficking, according to UNICEF is defined as “ any person under 18 who is recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for the purpose of exploitation, either within or outside a country”. With hundreds and hundreds of cases of children being trafficked and forced into sex slavery around the world each day, and the instrument of the Internet serving as a conduit for the same, certain aggressive measures have to be taken by all of us to put an end to these heinous crimes.
There's a new smartphone TrafficCam app, that's asking people from around the world to help stop human trafficking. The purpose of TraffickCam is to create a database of hotel room images that an investigator 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.
This is how TrafficCam works:
All the business candidates, student who go for interviews to other cities, who travel for no reason, here’s an app for you. It asks all its users to click atleast four pictures of the hotel rooms they stay in.
"You just enter your hotel room, and your room number. You take four pictures, and you submit them to the website. And, then those become part of the pipeline that law enforcement can use to track down where the victims are being trafficked." Washington University Researcher and TraffickCam developer Abby Stylianou.
The idea came up when the police wanted to identify a hotel where children had been trafficked.
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.
A few years ago, an American police department sought help from a non-profit organization, The Exchange Initiative, formed by the Nix Conference and Meeting Management, on how they could end sex trafficking of young kids. When the police showed an employee a picture of the hotel room in which the victim was, she knew exactly where it was located.
The pictures from the database are cross-referenced with available pictures showing victims of human trafficking.
The Internet, it seems, is a pool full of criminals openly advertising their heinous actions. It is flooded with thousands of pictures of victims of sex trafficking posed on beds in hotel rooms. The app makes it much easier for the authorities to identify the location of where the victims were and where they could possibly be.
Today, TraffickCam app is one of the leading app that is being used for saving the poor girls from trafficking. This app has a database with millions of pictures of hotel rooms from across the world. Everyone could be part of this initiative. It could mean saving the life of an innocent child.
Let’s be a part of a great initiative.