TraffickCam – stop sex trafficking with image recognition
traffickcam.com TraffickCam enables you to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms you stay in when you travel.
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. In order to use these photos, however, investigators must be able to determine where the photos were taken.
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.
TraffickCam was created in 2015 by the Exchange Initiative. The Exchange Initiative is committed to combating commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Their mission is to provide resources, information and networking solutions to combat sex trafficking in the United States.
The Exchange Initiative was created by Nix Conference & Meeting Management to empower individuals and organizations with real resources to help end sex trafficking. Nix Conference & Meeting Management is one of just 13 U.S. companies and 43 worldwide honored as a 2014 Top Member by the internationally recognized Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct (TheCode.org) for their exceptional work to integrate child protection practices into their business.
How in the world could image recognition tell apart the zillion hotel rooms that look identical? And what good does it do to know the room? It's not like the trafficker hangs out in a single hotel room.
Small differences such as placement of pictures on walls can be enough to tell rooms apart. As for what good? It can help linking up to other evidence such as hotel security cameras. It's (I assume) not useful to ID the room, but is useful to ID the hotel so that future surveillance can be planned. I am sad to be reminded that I once read a notice in my hotel room in Manila which asked me to verify the age of my guests and note that the age of sexual consent there is 18.
If you can get a reasonable timeframe for the photo (even a month or more) and you know specifically which room it should be trivial to get a list of occupants of that room during the time frame. Combing through tens of people should be manageable, and it should be less.
Summary: Crowdsourced pictures of interiors of hotel rooms, geolocated. When traffickers post pictures from hotels, similar interiors can be detected and reverse-geolocated to narrow down investigations.