Blockchains: A Role in Human Trafficking Investigations?
October 25, 2019
Human trafficking is one of the greatest evils in history as well as modern day. The Internet facilitates easy communication human traffickers, but they do not conduct their business in plain sight. They use the dark web to cover their sadistic business tracks. The Next Web explains that human traffickers might be easier to find than before in, “How A Blockchain-Based Digital ID System Could Help Tackle Human Trafficking.”
It is estimated that 20-40 million people are human trafficked, bringing in profits of $150 billion a year. Those are outrageous numbers! Emerging technologies such as data sharing and blockchain are becoming the favorable way to traffic people, but these technologies could also save the victims.
Digital IDs would be the key to blockchain technology. Human trafficking victims are denied resources that could help them escape, such as phones, computers, and other mobile technology. The victims are also stripped of any physical identification like passports or driver’s licenses. What if victims had a digital ID, made unique due to a fingerprint or eye scan, that cannot be stolen and would be easy to track?
“Once this is saved on a blockchain, the information is immutable and as such can not be forged, meaning traffickers wouldn’t be able to tamper it or change a victim’s identity. A strategy often used by traffickers to get their victims across border controls.
Importantly, blockchain technology is also decentralized, meaning that the embedded data is far more secure than it would be on a centralized server.
As a borderless technology, blockchain ID documentation and tracking can take place anywhere — so long as the parties involved are able to cooperate and collaborate while pledging to input the correct data.”
In other words, it is still the work of science fiction, but the possibility to make it a reality is not that far off.
Whitney Grace, October 25, 2019
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