Facebook is finally proceeding with its plan to proactively remove revenge porn and other forms of non-consensual pornographic images from its site.

As preposterous as it sounds, all you have to do is to send Facebook your nude images in advance.

Facebook says it will then “fingerprint” the images – that is create a digital profile of the image – and will block any attempts to post images matching that fingerprint to the social media network in the future.

After the image has been fingerprinted, the image will be deleted from Facebook servers.

This program has been a long time coming. Facebook first announced the plan for Australia back in November, but six months later had failed to launch a working service.

But last week Facebook announced it was finally proceeding with the pilot program, with a plan to launch it in Australia, the US, UK and Canada.

In Australia, it is being operated in conjunction with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, which will be the first point of contact for people concerned about their images used as revenge porn.

According to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, about 20% of Australians have experienced image-based abuse at some stage, which is why it was keen to work with Facebook to prevent it.

The process, according to Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Global Head of Safety, is this:

1. If you’re afraid of revenge porn images of you on the internet, you should contact the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, which already has a system dedicated to reports of image-based abuse (IBA). You will be asked to fill out a form.

2. After you submit the form, you’ll receive an email with a one-time link to a secure web site where you can upload your sensitive images.

3. A member of the Facebook Community Operations Safety Team will “review the report and create a unique fingerprint, or hash, that allows us to identify future uploads of the images without keeping copies of them on our servers.”

4. After the fingerprint is created, the images will be deleted from Facebook’s servers within seven days and you’ll be notified that the images have been hashed.

5. All images with matching fingerprints uploaded to Facebook in the future will automatically be blocked.

“It’s demeaning and devastating when someone’s intimate images are shared without their permission, and we want to do everything we can to help victims of this abuse,” noted Davis in a blog post.

“This is one step to help people who fear an intimate image will be shared without their consent.”

However, Facebook has rejected suggestions that it simply provide the image hashing tool to users to let them upload their own fingerprints rather than trusting their intimate images to a corporation not known for being a great steward of privacy.

“Any solution to this problem is facing some pretty serious constraints,” said Facebook CSO Alex Stamos on Twitter. “1) Perceptual hashes are tightly controlled, because they cannot be safely shipped into client code without bad guys creating ways to manipulate images to not be caught or to create false positives; and 2) A tool that prevents the posting of an image by two billion other people is incredibly powerful, one that needs guardrails. You don't want to create a form that is instantly used to ban images of protests or historical events that some governments want to memory hole.”