🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies not at all your standard startup entrepreneur. After multiple occurrences of clients distributing her private explicit images, she was "sufficiently outraged to take action" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

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

Little over a year after founding her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track abusers, has won several awards and was recommended as exemplary procedure in an independent pornography review recently.

This represents a significant shift from her previous career in offering consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the realms of kink and bondage.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, often referred to as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with perpetrators risking two years in prison.

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

Madelaine, thirty-seven, said survivors lived with shame and stigma. "In my view a lot of people will say, 'you shared a private image out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she said.

"I expect respect, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I don't see why those are negotiable," she added. "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 an error on my part, that's an individual being an abuser."

A Unique Journey

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 woman in control, a woman who is confident and powerful, giving my body as a gift to someone of my own volition," she described.

"Some believe it's unusual but I don't see it any differently to a nutritionist or an accountant providing a service," she added.

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

She maintained she was not technically inclined and was managed to build her company after a lot of late nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who understand tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

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

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

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

It means that if you discover your image has been circulated without your consent, providing the service you posted it on has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be encoded in the image and can be extracted by a forensic expert so legal steps can follow.

To date, one service has adopted her tech and she's in discussions with many others.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"This technology already exists in Hollywood, it already exists in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a new application and a new system," explained Madelaine.

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

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

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An advocate from a leading helpline said she had seen first-hand the trauma and guilt intimate image abuse inflicted on victims.

"If that self-blame is compounded by a misinformed friend or professional who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt 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 inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to bring about change, saying: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to solve this problem, not just support services, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when photographs of her in her underwear were shared around her local community. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess experienced in her youth that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It required years, 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 dedicated to removing the stigma of this crime from the victims to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to consensually send an photo to someone," stated Jess.

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