🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents not at all your standard startup entrepreneur. After repeated instances of clients distributing her intimate photographs, she felt "angry enough to take action" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

"Those were striking images, I'm unapologetic of the pictures, I'm ashamed of the way that they were weaponized by someone who I don't know," explained Madelaine.

Little over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which employs covert digital tracking to identify perpetrators, has won several awards and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This represents quite a departure from her background in providing consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the realms of kink and bondage.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known 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 sex industry. A study suggests that around 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by this form of abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained survivors lived with shame and stigma. "In my view a lot of people will comment, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she noted.

"I demand dignity, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I don't see why those are negotiable," she continued. "The reality that those images could be then shared in my community or with people I love and employed to cause them pain, that's beyond, that's not my choice, that's not an error on my part, that's an individual committing abuse."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, primarily online, for 10 years and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "It's me as a woman in control, a woman who is empowered and strong, offering my body as a gift to someone of my own volition," she described.

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

She welcomes being a unique figure in the technology sector. "I understand that it's unconventional, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a tech company, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the loopholes and the changes that were necessary," she stated.

She maintained she was not technically inclined and was able to build her company after a lot of late nights, research and "bugging people" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

Image Angel can be implemented on any online platform where people exchange photos, for instance dating apps, social media and online sites.

When an image is viewed by a viewer, it is automatically embedded with an invisible forensic watermark which is unique to them.

This covert marker is encoded within the copy of the image itself and can survive screen shots, being edited and being re-captured with a different camera.

It means that if you find out your image has been circulated without your consent, providing the service you used has the technology embedded, the viewer's details will be encoded in the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist so legal steps can follow.

Currently, one platform has implemented her tech and she's in discussions with several more.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"The system already exists in Hollywood, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a novel use and a different framework," said Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're collaborating with a firm that has decades of expertise in developing technology so we are confident that this is reliable and what we now need to do is deploy it widely," she continued.

She expressed hope she hoped the technology would also act as a preventive measure to would-be perpetrators.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An expert from a support service said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt intimate image abuse caused for victims.

"If that self-blame is compounded by a misinformed friend or service who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's crucial that the support a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she emphasized.

She noted it was fantastic that Madelaine was using her experience to create solutions, saying: "It is really important to have this comprehensive strategy towards addressing technology-enabled abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to tackle this alone, no one helpline, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when images of her in her underwear were shared around her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured in her youth that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

"It took so long, an excessive amount of time for someone to tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the victims 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 responsibility is," she concluded.