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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.
This might be somewhat helpful, but there is one problem. Most budget chain hotels are remodeling in the following manner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Every Motel 6 is going to look *exactly* the same. A few years ago my friend was traveling extensively for work. After a few weeks on the road, staying exclusively at Staybridge by Mariott, he would forget what town he was in, as every room was exactly the same, down to the artwork on the wall. He'd have to check the weather on his phone to get an idea of how long it would take to get to the work site from his hotel.
For the smaller, really cheap independent hotels this might be helpful, but most people going on vacation are staying at chains.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Can't they just install Samsung Smart TVs in every hotel and take the pictures themselves?
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!
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.