If the "S" on Superman's chest means hope in Kryptonian language, here on Earth, G is for hope as Google embarks in a noble crusade to eradicate child pornography and abuse imagery on the Internet.
Google has been known as a member of the Technology Coalition, a group of technology companies, which provides assistance to different organizations fighting child pornography and helping parents find their missing children.
The search giant is working on a technology that will imprint child sexual abuse photos with digital "fingerprints" that will allow law enforcement, charities and companies to easily collaborate and detect exploitative images of kids online.
The new tool will intensify the capabilities of an existing "hashing" technology implemented by Google that tags and blocks child pornography images. It is expected to be operational by 2014.
On June 15, Google Giving director Jacqueline Fuller announced through a blog post that Google will be beefing up its campaign to protect children from abuse.
"There is much more that can be done, and Google is taking our commitment another step further through a $5 million effort to eradicate child abuse imagery online. Part of this commitment will go to global child protection partners like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation," Fuller wrote on the official blog of Google.
"We're providing additional support to similar heroic organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America," she added.
Google is also injecting a Child Protection Technology Fund of $2 million to help develop more tools that will be effective in clearing the Internet of child pornography.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCME) reported that since 1998, Cyber Tipline has received over 1.7 million suspected cases of child exploitation. The group has also reviewed more than 80 million child pornography images since 2002.
The NCME also noted of the skyrocketing cases of sexual exploitation of kids since the 1990s.
"This is an important moment. It should focus the minds of other industry leaders in relation to how they are going to join the fight," said John Carr, a London-based child internet adviser for the government, in an interview with The Telegraph.
"Google have stepped up. No one can argue about that. In all my time working in this space no company has ever devoted anything like this level of resources to working with civil society organisations to attack online child abuse images," Carr added.
The participation of Google is definitely a big plus as the world looks for more champions in the fight against child pornography.
