There’s a Horrific Reason Why You Should Take Photos Of Your Hotel Room

Do you take photos of your hotel room when you go out of town for a vacation?

You should.

While its the usual practice for camera-happy tourists to snap photos of their various destinations, hotel room photos may be low on the list. However, there’s a perfectly good reason to take pictures of your hotel room when you travel.

They may appear bland and ordinary compared to more interesting tourist attractions…

…but these photos can actually save a child’s life.

And the connection?

There’s a free downloadable app that’s been created for iPhone, iPad and Android devices that allows you to upload snaps of your hotel room. Its called the TraffickCam app, and it helps authorities identify places where children may have been trafficked.

These photos of hotel rooms, uploaded to the app’s website TraffickCam.org, help pinpoint accommodations where traffickers have set up shop.

A perfectly normal hotel room can harbor a dark secret.

Trafficked children are often posed on hotel beds and photographed. The internet makes it easier for traffickers to use these photos in online advertisements targeted at sweatshop owners, brothels, and pedophiles.

It always ends badly for the victims.

They become unpaid laborers, or worse – sex slaves!

In a bid to end child trafficking, sex trafficking, child exploitation and human trafficking of all kinds, police joined forces with Exchange Initiative. The E.I. is an organization created to help stop sex trafficking.

TraffickCam app resulted from this union, allowing authorities to easily identify hotel or motel rooms around the world. And to halt human trafficking once and for all.

Authorities compare these seemingly generic-looking rooms in the ads to the database of photos uploaded by the app’s users. When they pinpoint the exact rooms used, they immediately proceed to the crime scene, which brings them closer to recovering the victims and apprehending the perpetrators.

So far, TraffickCam’s database contains over 1.5 million hotel room photos from around the world.

Most of these crowdsourced from the app’s users.

So if you are out of town on business or on vacation, don’t forget to take photos of your hotel room and upload them to TraffickCam.

Who knows, the life you save may be your child’s own.

H/T: AOL and Exchange Initiative