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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies not at all your average startup entrepreneur. Following repeated instances of clients leaking her intimate photographs, she was "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were weaponized by an individual who I don't know," explained Madelaine.

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

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

A Widespread Issue

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

It is far from an issue exclusively faced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A study indicates that around 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, 37, said survivors endured shame and stigma. "In my view a lot of people will say, 'you put a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she noted.

"I expect dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she added. "The reality that those images could be subsequently distributed where I live or with people I love and used to hurt them, that's beyond, that's not my choice, that's not my mistake, that's an individual being an abuser."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been practicing as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "It's me 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 strange but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an accountant providing a service," she remarked.

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I know that it's bizarre, it's remarkable to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a tech company, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to understand the flaws and the modifications that needed to happen," she stated.

She insisted she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after a lot of late nights, research and "bugging people" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

Image Angel can be used by any digital service where people exchange photos, for instance dating apps, social networks and websites.

When an image is viewed by a user, it is automatically embedded with an invisible forensic watermark which is specific to that viewer.

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 means that if you discover your image has been circulated without your consent, as long as the platform you used has the system integrated, 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 platform has adopted her tech and she's in discussions with many others.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"This technology is already in use in the film industry, it already exists in sports broadcasting so this is not an untested concept, it's just a novel use and a new system," explained Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a firm that has 30 years experience in tech development so we are confident that this is reliable 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 preventive measure to potential intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

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 misinformed friend or service who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be reinforced so it's really important that the response somebody is provided with is that they have not done anything wrong," she emphasized.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, adding: "It is really important to have this comprehensive strategy towards addressing technology-enabled gender-based abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to solve this problem, no one helpline, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in her underwear were circulated within her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It required years, too long for someone to say to me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is dedicated to removing the stigma of intimate image abuse from the victims to the offenders. "There is no offence to consensually send an photo to someone," stated Jess.

"However, it is illegal to circulate that non-consensually and I think that should always be where the blame is," she concluded.