🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies far from your typical tech founder. After repeated occurrences of individuals distributing her private explicit images, she felt "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

"These were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm ashamed of the manner that they were used against me by an individual who I don't know," said Madelaine.

Just over a year after launching her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as exemplary procedure in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

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

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, often referred to as image-based abuse, 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 report suggests that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is affected by intimate image abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, 37, explained victims lived with feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you shared a private image out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she noted.

"I demand respect, I expect respect, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are up for debate," 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 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 a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a woman in control, a woman who is confident and powerful, giving my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she described.

"People think it's unusual but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an financial advisor giving advice," she added.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I know that it's unconventional, it's remarkable to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a tech company, but it required someone who has been through it to understand the loopholes and the changes that were necessary," she explained.

She maintained she was not technically inclined 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 social connection apps, social networks and websites.

When an image is viewed by a user, it is automatically embedded with an undetectable digital marker which is specific to that viewer.

This covert marker is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can withstand screen shots, being edited and being photographed with a secondary device.

It means that if you find out your image has been circulated without your consent, providing the platform you used has the technology embedded, the viewer's details will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a forensic expert so action can be taken.

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

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"This technology already exists in Hollywood, it is employed in sports broadcasting so this is not brand new technology, it's just a novel use and a different framework," explained 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 believed the technology would also act as a deterrent 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 inflicted on victims.

"When that guilt is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or service who says 'what did you expect?' that self blame can really be deepened so it's really important that the response a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she emphasized.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, adding: "It is vital to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling technology-enabled abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to solve this problem, not just support services, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in a state of undress were shared around her town. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later shape her advocacy work.

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

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of intimate image abuse from the victims to the perpetrators. "There is no offence to willingly share an image to someone," stated Jess.

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