A new app is asking travellers to take photos of their empty hotel rooms and upload them to a database that can be used by police to locate sex traffickers and their victims.
The non-profit organization Exchange Initiative and researchers at Washington University developed last year.
The free app asks users to take photos of their empty hotel room and upload them to a database. The app does not collect any personal information other than the phone's GPS location, and any photos with people in them are automatically rejected.
Police and sex crimes investigators can then securely upload ads featuring photos of sex trafficking victims to the database. Image analysis tools will then attempt to find matches between the ad and the crowdsourced photos.
"Sex traffickers regularly post photos of victims posed in hotel rooms in their online advertisements," . "Investigators can use these as evidence to find victims and prosecute perpetrators if they can determine where the photos were taken."
Features such as the hotel room's carpeting, furniture, accessories and window views are matched against the database of submitted images, giving police a list of potential hotels where a victim's photo may have been taken, Exchange Initiative says.
The app developers say early testing shows TraffickCam is 85 per cent accurate in identifying the correct hotel in the first 20 matches.
The app's database currently contains 1.5 million photos from more than 145,000 hotels from across the U.S., Exchange Initiative said in a press release.
Det. David Correa, of the Toronto Police Human Trafficking Enforcement Team, said that while he's not familiar with TraffickCam, he sees how such a tool could be beneficial to investigations.
"There's always a value in being able to corroborate certain facts," he told CTVNews.ca. He said that sex trafficking victims often present police with ads they were in, however they aren't always sure which hotels they were taken to.
"That's one of the elements of human trafficking, (the traffickers) don't let the (victims) get too comfortable in one area for an extended period of time," he said. Therefore, being able to establish which hotels they may have been at can help with the police probe, Correa said.
"It is an investigative tool in that sense," he said. "It wouldn't hurt."
This type of tool may also be helpful in missing persons cases, Correa added, noting that often family members come to police with an ad featuring a photo of their missing relative posed in a hotel room.
In this case, a database of hotel rooms may give officers a sense of where the victim may be, he said.
The app was founded by a few individuals in St. Louis, Mo., who work in the meeting and conference planning industry and, as a result, travel often.
Molly Hackett, principal of Exchange Initiative, said she and her partners decided to make the app after realizing that they could potentially help police because of their travel experience.
"The first time we were able to help law enforcement identify a hotel where a trafficked child had been photographed, we realized that our travel experience was valuable in the fight against sex trafficking," she said in a press release.
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