Why you should take a photo of your hotel room – and help stop trafficking

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Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zevhonith/ CC by 2.0

Porn sites often feature hotel rooms. The operators rely on the anonymity of a hotel room when live-streaming porn or make filthy movies.

But what’s worse, is that hotel rooms are used for sex trafficking. Women and children are displayed and sold online. Usually from hotel rooms. Well, now there’s something you can do to help detectives trying to identify a hotel room from all the millions across the world. If you have a smart phone with a camera, you just download this app and snap four photos when you first enter your hotel room (There’s nothing to identify you at this point.)

The TraffickCam app — which is free and available for iPhone, iPad and Android — allows you to upload pictures of your hotel room, where they are then matched to a database used by law enforcement. This can help the police identify where trafficked children are.

“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 explains. Since its creation, TraffickCam has acquired over 1.5 million photos of hotels around the world.

Will you add to their database?