Laura Hobson, Co-Founder & COO, YoursGlobal · · 4 min read
No consumer scan can guarantee that a space is free of surveillance devices. YourSweep supports a room check; combine app results with visual inspection and appropriate help when something seems wrong.
A few months ago, we started hearing the same question from a different kind of traveler than the ones we originally built YourSweep for. Not solo backpackers or honeymooners — HR leads, travel risk managers, and journalism organizations asking: "What are we actually responsible for when we book someone into a hotel?"
It's a fair question, and most companies don't have a good answer yet.
Most corporate travel risk programs are built around the risks that make headlines — kidnapping, political unrest, natural disasters, medical emergencies abroad. Very few account for something far more common and far easier to prevent: hidden cameras, Bluetooth trackers, and tampered room access systems in the hotels and short-term rentals your employees stay in every week.
This isn't a hypothetical. Hidden camera incidents in hotels and rentals get reported with increasing frequency, and the devices themselves have gotten smaller, cheaper, and easier to disguise — in phone chargers, smoke detectors, even screw heads. Bluetooth trackers like AirTags have introduced a newer risk: employees, especially those traveling alone, being tracked without their knowledge across a trip.
None of this shows up in a standard travel risk briefing.
For organizations with employees who travel frequently — consultants, field journalists, NGO staff, airline crews — this isn't a personal safety add-on. It's the same category of obligation as pre-trip health and security briefings. A company that would never send someone into a high-risk region without a briefing often hasn't thought about the risk sitting inside a routine hotel room.
The fix doesn't require a large program. It requires two things: awareness, and a fast way to check.
At minimum, a thorough room check covers three things:
Doing this manually takes a few minutes and a working knowledge of what to look for — which is exactly why almost no one does it consistently, even when they know they should.
We built YourSweep to make this a five-minute habit instead of a skill only security-conscious travelers have. It supports all three checks — camera, tracker, and key card tampering checks — in one app, and is currently a Top 10 Travel App with a 5.0 rating on the App Store and 4.4 on Google Play (as of September 2026), available on every continent. Monthly and annual subscriptions are both live on iOS and Android. No consumer scan can guarantee that a space is free of surveillance devices.
For organizations, we think of it less as a consumer app and more as a piece of travel risk infrastructure — something that sits alongside your existing duty-of-care policy rather than replacing it.
If your organization sends people on the road regularly and this isn't part of your current briefing, it's worth a five-minute conversation. Happy to share what we're seeing and how other organizations are approaching it.
— Laura Hobson, Co-Founder & COO, YoursGlobal