
TraffickCam – stop sex trafficking with image recognition - alexholehouse
https://traffickcam.com
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killertypo

        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.
    

figured it would be good to link exactly how this system works and the purpose
since I was a little confused when I got to the home page

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mchahn
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.

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throwaway049
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.

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croon
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.

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niftich
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.

