Slashdot Mirror
Your Hotel Room Photos Could Help Catch Sex Traffickers (cnn.com)
100,000 people people have already downloaded an app that helps fight human trafficking. dryriver summarizes a report from CNN:
Police find an ad for paid sex online. It's an illegally trafficked underage girl posing provocatively in a hotel room. But police don't know where this hotel room is -- what city, what neighborhood, what hotel or hotel room. This is where the TraffickCam phone app comes in. When you're staying at a hotel, you take pictures of your room... The app logs the GPS data (location of the hotel) and also analyzes what's in the picture -- the furniture, bed sheets, carpet and other visual features. This makes the hotel room identifiable. Now when police come across a sex trafficking picture online, there is a database of images that may reveal which hotel room the picture was taken in.
"Technology drives everything we do nowadays, and this is just one more tool that law enforcement can use to make our job a little safer and a little bit easier," says Sergeant Adam Kavanaugh, supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force. "Right now we're just beta testing the St. Louis area, and we're getting positive hits," he says (meaning ads that match hotel-room photos in the database). But the app's creators hope to make it available to all U.S. law enforcement within the next few months, and eventually globally, so their app is already collecting photographs from hotel rooms around the world to be stored for future use.
"Technology drives everything we do nowadays, and this is just one more tool that law enforcement can use to make our job a little safer and a little bit easier," says Sergeant Adam Kavanaugh, supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force. "Right now we're just beta testing the St. Louis area, and we're getting positive hits," he says (meaning ads that match hotel-room photos in the database). But the app's creators hope to make it available to all U.S. law enforcement within the next few months, and eventually globally, so their app is already collecting photographs from hotel rooms around the world to be stored for future use.
And what is the purpose of this technical solution anyway? Police see an online ad but can't find the location of the "trafficked girl"...when all they'd need to do is call and ask!
I also question that they are really going after "sex traffickers" as opposed to independent women who simply make their own choices about how to earn money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why don't they just get the hotel operators to take a picuture of every room instead of crowd sourcing it to the public? Sheesh. Hotels.com could sponsor it under the guise that they'd have a picture of the room you are booking when you make a reservation.
As for the "boy", he was 17 years old, with a history of selling himself for sex/drugs.
And as for the Senator, he's married with children and has a history of pushing anti-gay and anti-marijuana legislation. Then he gets caught in a motel with an underage boy and marijuana. It's just another example of the incredible projection and hypocrisy that infects the Republican party to its core. Anytime a conservative starts yelling about outlawing something, look closely because he's probably doing a lot of that thing himself.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm