New App Helps Germans Find Prostitutes

Screen-Shot-2014-04-23-at-2.02.49-PM-480x338

If a German app launched this month succeeds, smartphones could well be the next big marketplace for prostitution. Not unlike Uber for sex workers, the Berlin-based Peppr app uses GPS to connect potential clients with prostitutes in their immediate area. Prostitution is legal in Germany, and the app’s declared intention is to save prostitutes from having to pound sidewalks for customers. It was created by Austrian developer Pia Poppenreiter – you couldn’t make up her (actually genuine) last name, which translates loosely as “screw-rider” – who came up with the idea after seeing sex workers out of doors on a cold night. “The story always sounds corny, but it’s true,” she told German start-up magazine Grunderszene. She continued:

On a late autumn day in Berlin, I was on my way with a friend to a bar on Oranienburger Straße. It was cold – I had a skirt on myself – and I saw a sex worker on the street. I thought, “It’s crazy that there’s an app for everything, but not for that. Why do they have to stand there in the winter all day?” That thought has never left me.

To help make sure that its sex workers don’t become part of any human trafficking chain, Peppr interviews its advertisers over the phone before they sign them up, hoping to weed out anyone who is working against their will. The company will also not work with brothels, only individuals and escort agencies.

 

 

Now this is technology I can get behind. I’ve said this before but I couldn’t care less about space travel or living to 150 or electric cars, all that shit is just window dressing. You want technological advancements that matter you make it so I can call a whore to my apartment with the swipe of a button. What a fucking world. Now the only question is how do we get this to America? So that you can use an app instead of craigslist and not run the risk of talking to a robot or having it be a sting operation that airs on COPS.