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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies not at all your average tech founder. After repeated occurrences of clients leaking her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to take action" and turned to technology for answers.

"These were beautiful pictures, I'm unapologetic of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were weaponized by an individual who I don't know," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to identify perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was recommended as best practice in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

This represents quite a departure from her previous career in providing consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the realms of BDSM.

A Widespread Issue

The non-consensual sharing of private images, often referred to as revenge porn, is a criminal offence with perpetrators facing up to two years in prison.

It is far from an issue exclusively faced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A report indicates that around 1.42% of the women in the UK is affected by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, 37, explained survivors lived with feelings of humiliation. "In my view a lot of people will comment, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she said.

"I demand respect, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I fail to understand why those are up for debate," she continued. "The fact that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with my loved ones and employed to cause them pain, that's unacceptable, that's not my choice, that's not my mistake, that's someone committing abuse."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a professional dominatrix, primarily online, for a decade and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "I am as a dominant woman, a woman who is empowered and strong, giving my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she said.

"Some believe it's strange but I don't see it any differently to a personal trainer or an accountant giving advice," she remarked.

She embraces being a unique figure in the world of tech. "I know that it's unconventional, it's remarkable to think that an individual who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a technology firm, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the loopholes and the changes that needed to happen," she stated.

She insisted she was not technically inclined and was managed to build her company after a lot of sleepless nights, research and "bugging people" who understand tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

Image Angel can be implemented on any digital service where people share images, for instance social connection apps, social networks and websites.

When an image is accessed by a user, it is seamlessly tagged with an undetectable digital marker which is unique to them.

This invisible watermark is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can survive screenshots, being edited and being photographed with a different camera.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been circulated non-consensually, providing the service you used has the technology embedded, the viewer's details will be encoded in the image and can be retrieved by a data recovery specialist so action can be taken.

Currently, one service has adopted her tech and she's in talks with several more.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"The system is already in use in the film industry, it already exists in sports broadcasting so this is not an untested concept, it's just a novel use and a new system," explained Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a company that has decades of expertise in tech development so we are confident that this is reliable and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she continued.

She said she hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be perpetrators.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a support service commented she had seen first-hand the panic, distress and self-blame intimate image abuse caused for victims.

"If that self-blame is reinforced by a misinformed friend or professional who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that self blame can really be deepened so it's crucial that the support a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she emphasized.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to bring about change, saying: "It is vital to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling technology-enabled abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to tackle this alone, no one helpline, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when images of her in her underwear were shared around her town. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her youth that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It took so long, an excessive amount of time for someone to say to me, 'it wasn't your fault' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the survivors to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to consensually send an image to someone," said Jess.

"However, it is illegal to circulate that non-consensually and I think that should always be where the blame is," she affirmed.