🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas is not at all your standard tech founder. After multiple occurrences of individuals leaking her private explicit images, she was "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to tech solutions for a solution.

"Those were striking images, I'm not ashamed of the photographs, I'm ashamed of the manner that they were used against me by someone who I don't know," said Madelaine.

Just over a year after founding her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to identify perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This marks quite a departure from her background in providing consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the realms of BDSM.

A Widespread Issue

Intimate image abuse, often referred to as revenge porn, is a criminal offence with offenders facing up to two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A study suggests that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by intimate image abuse each year.

Madelaine, 37, explained survivors lived with shame and stigma. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you put a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she said.

"I demand dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I don't see why those are negotiable," she continued. "The reality that those images could be then shared where I live or with my loved ones and employed to cause them pain, that's unacceptable, that's not a decision I made, that's not my mistake, that's someone committing abuse."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "I am as a woman in control, a woman who is confident and powerful, giving my body as a treat to someone because I wish to," she described.

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

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I understand that it's bizarre, it's crazy to think that an individual who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a technology firm, but it took someone who has been through it to know the loopholes and the modifications that were necessary," she stated.

She insisted she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after a lot of sleepless nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who know about tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

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

When an image is accessed 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 withstand screen shots, being edited and being re-captured with a different camera.

It ensures that if you discover your image has been shared non-consensually, as long as 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 action can be taken.

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

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"The system already exists in the film industry, it already exists in live television so this is not brand new technology, it's just a new application and a new system," said Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a company that has 30 years experience in tech development so we know that this is solid and what we now need to do is deploy it widely," she added.

She expressed hope she hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to potential perpetrators.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a support service said she had seen directly the panic, distress and self-blame this abuse inflicted on victims.

"When that guilt is reinforced by a misinformed friend or service who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's crucial that the response somebody is provided with is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She noted it was inspiring that Madelaine was using her experience to create solutions, adding: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to tackle this alone, not just support services, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

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 endured in her youth that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

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

She too is dedicated to eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the survivors to the offenders. "There is no offence to consensually send an photo to someone," said Jess.

"But it is a crime to circulate that without consent and I think that should always be where the blame is," she affirmed.