🔗 Share this article

BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents far from your average tech founder. Following multiple occurrences of individuals leaking her private explicit images, she was "angry enough to take action" and turned to technology for a solution.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were used against me by an individual who I have never met," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year after founding her company, Image Angel, which uses covert digital tracking to track abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This marks a significant shift from her previous career in offering consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the realms of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as image-based abuse, is a punishable crime with offenders facing up to two years in prison.

It is far from an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A report indicates that around 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by this form of abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, said 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 expect?'," she said.

"I expect respect, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I don't see why those are up for debate," she added. "The reality that those images could be then shared in my community or with people I love and used to hurt them, that's unacceptable, that's not my choice, that's not an error on my part, that's an individual committing abuse."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been practicing as a professional dominatrix, primarily online, for a decade and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "It's me as a dominant woman, a woman who is empowered and strong, offering my body as a treat to someone because I wish to," she said.

"People think it's strange but I view it similarly to a nutritionist or an accountant giving advice," she added.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the world of tech. "I understand that it's unconventional, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a tech company, but it took someone who has been through it to understand the loopholes and the modifications that were necessary," she stated.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after many late nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

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

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

This covert marker is embedded into the digital file of the image itself and can withstand screen shots, being altered and being re-captured with a secondary device.

It means that if you discover your image has been shared without your consent, as long as the service 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 service has implemented her tech and she's in discussions with many others.

Proven Technology, New Application

"This technology already exists in the film industry, it already exists in sports broadcasting so this is not brand new technology, it's just a new application and a different framework," said Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're collaborating with a company that has decades of expertise in tech development so we are confident that this is solid and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she added.

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

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

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

"When that guilt is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or professional 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 response a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she stated.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing technology-enabled 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 photographs 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 shape her advocacy work.

"It took so long, too long 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. "There is no offence to consensually send an image to someone," stated Jess.

"However, it is illegal to distribute that non-consensually and I think that should invariably be where the blame is," she affirmed.