Giving Compass' Take:

• TechCrunch reports on a recent two-day coding session at Facebook headquarters, where the social media company invited engineers from Microsoft, Twitter, Google and others to help design free tools that nonprofits could use to fight sex-trafficking.

• How can AI and other new technologies help NGOs battle exploitation worldwide? Those involved in the space should look at the solutions that emerge from collaborative projects such as this one.

• Here are more businesses that are making putting an end to sex trafficking their mission.

Tech giants put their rivalries aside for two days this week to code for a common cause: protecting children on the internet. Deep inside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, teams drawn from Uber, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Pinterest worked through the night to prototype new tools designed to help nonprofits in their fight against child sex trafficking.

Much of their work from Facebook’s third annual child safety hackathon is actually too sensitive to publish. To stay one step ahead of the criminals, the specifics of how these tools track traffickers and missing children across websites must be kept secret. But the resulting products, all donated to NGOs like Thorn and the Internet Watch Foundation, could help tech companies rally a united front against those who’d seek to hurt kids.

“The thing with work on safety and security and fighting abuse is it’s an area where the industry is collaborative,” says Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of product management and one of the event’s judges. “Hackathons are a great way to bring people together to actually bootstrap some of these ideas ... ensuring that the engineers who have the smart ideas can actually understand the pain points and apply that thinking to these problems.”

Read the full article about Facebook's anti-sex trafficking hackathon by Josh Constine at TechCrunch.