Slightly different to any other travel app we’ve ever featured, when it comes to doing something for the greater good downloading this app is a no brainer – particularly because it involves something most of us are doing already.
Let’s be honest, when we check into a hotel the first thing most of us tend to do is to take a photo of the room to share with our friends or family back home. No judgement is intended here – part of the joy of travel is staying somewhere different to your own home. In a brilliant initiative, the brains behind the Exchange Initiative have created ‘TraffickCam’, which leverages this idea in the hope of bringing an end to sex trafficking around the world.
So how does it work? Relying on travellers to upload photos of their hotel rooms, TraffickCam allows police to cross-reference the photos uploaded by users of the app with photos gathered from sex-trafficking cases. The system works to detect similarities between both sets of photos with the overall goal of identifying the locations in question.
Launched in June last year, the app has already been downloaded more than 50,000 times and receives an estimated 1700 photos of hotel rooms each day. In order to help put an end to this worldwide issue TraffickCam have requested users to: “take two pictures of the entire room from different locations, one picture of the bed from the foot of the bed, and one picture of the bathroom from the doorway. Please make sure there are no people in your photos.”
So next time you get into your hotel room and take a photo, make sure the first upload you do is to the TraffickCam app – you never know whose life you could potentially be saving.
RRP: free from the iTunes Store and Google Play.
Read more at TraffickCam and tell us if you take photos of your hotel room when you check in?
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