This week, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced that it has collaborated with the UK-based nonprofit Revenge Porn Helpline to create a tool that helps users prevent sensitive images of them from being uploaded without their consent. However, there’s one important catch — users will first need to hand the image over.

The new feature allows users to upload images or video they fear will leak to a central website called StopNCII.org. The content is then marked with a “hash” that will alert Facebook and Instagram if the image is uploaded to social media by someone else. In effect, this tool will help to stop so-called revenge porn before it even has a chance to spread online in the first place.

“It’s a massive step forward,” the tool’s manager, Sophie Mortimer, told NBC News. “The key for me is about putting this control over content back into the hands of people directly affected by this issue so they are not just left at the whims of a perpetrator threatening to share it.”

However, Mortimer also noted how important it is that Facebook is not the public face for this tool, and that the company’s reputation for protecting “privacy and people’s data is not what they’d like it to be.” It still might prove to be an uphill battle to get people to upload nude photos of themselves to a nonprofit’s database, but this tool is at least a step in the right direction toward better protecting vulnerable users.

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