If you have been the victim of “revenge porn” – intimate pictures stolen and published in an attempt to humiliate or blackmail – Facebook has a proposal that might sound counterintuitive: cc them in to your sexts.

But give it a chance. The company’s offering is a better idea than it sounds. Facebook has spent years working with other large technology firms to build software that can identify problem images the second they hit the net, and flag and remove them without the need for human intervention. The scheme, which has already been trialled in Australia, will be tested in the UK from this week.

With brand names such as PhotoDNA, the technologies create a digital fingerprint or “hash” of an image or video, which can then be compared to future uploads to find matches and remove them automatically. It is good enough that it doesn’t get fooled by simple alterations such as colour tweaks, watermarks or crops, and it has already successfully been put to use in tackling terrorist propaganda and child abuse imagery posted online.

But the problem with revenge porn is that it is hard to know what to put on the banned list in the first place. You can’t search for “revenge porn”: for one thing, a lot of it is actually just mislabeled non-revenge porn (not a problem for Facebook, which also bans that, but more of an issue for companies with less-strict controls on adult content). But more importantly, if something has already been published and flagged, it may well be too late to take down future uploads: someone’s life could already be ruined. And what if the pictures are being shared in a closed group, where the subject isn’t even aware they’re bring leered over?

Hence Facebook’s proposal. If you pre-emptively send them your nudes, the company knows to hash them in advance – and hopefully prevent the worst consequences of a spiteful ex or malicious hack.

It may sound odd, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to argue for trusting Facebook with the most sensitive data imaginable, but it has some of the best security in the business, so you don’t have to worry about what you give over being hacked or stolen (your pictures are almost certainly more at risk sitting on your phone than they are in any part of the uploading and hashing process). And as for misusing the data – well, it may be evil, in the sort of banal, spreadsheety way a lot of major companies are, but it’s not stupid. Misusing these images would be a PR scandal at the company-destroying end of the scale. In this case, its interests are the same as everyone else’s: for you to be able to practise safe sext.