Google is announcing an international philanthropic project, “Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network,” created to help eradicate the problem of modern slavery. The initiative, funded by Google, is a collaborative effort by Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and LaStrada International. The new initiative combines expertise of the members, which are primarily working in three regions, United States, the Mekong Delta region and Europe. It is designed to make it simpler for the victims of human trafficking to get a timely support both in the USA and abroad.

Currently, nearly 21 million people in the world are enslaved in various ways (from prostitution to economic exploitation), and the forced laborers generate at least $32 billion of illicit profits annually. The idea of the new project initiated at Google Ideas INFO Summit, which took place in mid-2012. The project received a $3 million grant as part of the Global Impact Awards program, launched last December to sponsor new ideas that have a potential to change the world for better. Together with the grants provided by Google in 2011, the company has donated $14.5 million to anti-trafficking efforts.

In the blogpost, Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving state that the new initiative will allow to operate on the international level, since the Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network “will collect data from local hotline efforts, share promising practices and create anti-trafficking strategies that build on common patterns and focus on eradication, prevention and victim protection.” For the better performance of the new platform, some help is to be sourced from third-party companies, too. Polaris Project will extend its collaboration with Palantir Technologies that will provide its data integration and analytics platform for the initiative. The project also gets informational support from Salesforce.com that is helping Polaris Project drive their call tracking infrastructure to the global level.

The new project is important both because it will render actual support to the human-trafficking victims, and also because it will help generate analytical data and increase the amount of shared useful information. “Appropriate data can tell the anti-trafficking community which campaigns are most effective at reducing slavery, what sectors are undergoing global spikes in slavery, or if the reduction of slavery in one country coincides with an increase right across the border,” writes Google’s blogpost.

In 2012, another initiative in the social field was launched with the participation of Google. The digital project Against Violent Extremism (AVE) was brought up by Google Ideas, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), the Gen Next Foundation and Rehabstudio to help tackle the problem of modern extremism by sharing experiences of former extremists and survivors.