🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas is not at all your typical tech founder. After multiple occurrences of individuals leaking her intimate photographs, she felt "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to technology for a solution.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm unapologetic of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were used against me by an individual who I have never met," said Madelaine.

Just over a year after founding her venture, Image Angel, which employs covert digital tracking to identify perpetrators, has won several awards and was recommended as exemplary procedure in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

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

The Pervasive Problem

The non-consensual sharing of private images, commonly known as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with offenders facing up to two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue exclusively faced by those in the sex industry. A study suggests that approximately 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, said survivors lived with feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will comment, 'you put a private image 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 negotiable," she added. "The fact that those images could be then shared in my community or with people I love and employed to cause them pain, that's unacceptable, that's not my choice, that's not my mistake, that's an individual committing abuse."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and always found her work liberating and satisfying. "It's me as a dominant woman, a woman who is confident and powerful, offering my body as a gift to someone of my own volition," she said.

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

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I understand that it's unconventional, 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 understand the flaws and the changes that were necessary," she explained.

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

How Does the Technology Work?

Image Angel can be used by any digital service where people share images, for instance dating apps, social media and websites.

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

This invisible watermark is encoded within the digital file of the image itself and can withstand screenshots, being edited and being photographed with a different camera.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been circulated without your consent, as long as the service you used has the system integrated, the sharer's information 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 talks with many others.

Proven Technology, New Application

"This technology is already in use in the film industry, it already exists in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a new application and a new system," said Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're collaborating with a company that has 30 years experience in developing technology so we are confident that this is solid 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 preventive measure to potential intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a support service commented she had seen directly 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 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's really important that the response somebody is provided with is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because a single solution 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 circulated within her town. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

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

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the victims to the offenders. "There is no offence to willingly share an photo to someone," said Jess.

"However, it is illegal to distribute that without consent and I think that should invariably be where the blame is," she affirmed.