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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents not at all your typical startup entrepreneur. After multiple occurrences of clients leaking her private explicit images, she was "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to technology for answers.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the way that they were weaponized by an individual who I have never met," explained Madelaine.

Just over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which uses invisible forensic watermarking to identify perpetrators, has won several awards and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This marks quite a departure from her background in providing BDSM services, dominating clients in the world of kink and bondage.

A Widespread Issue

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with offenders risking two years in prison.

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

Madelaine, 37, said victims 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 anticipate?'," she said.

"I demand respect, I expect respect, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she continued. "The reality that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with my loved ones and used to hurt them, that's beyond, that's not my choice, 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, primarily online, for 10 years 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 of my own volition," she said.

"People think it's strange but I view it similarly to a nutritionist or an financial advisor providing a service," she remarked.

She welcomes being a unique figure 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 tech company, but it required someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the flaws and the modifications that needed to happen," she stated.

She insisted she was not technically inclined and was able to build her company after many late nights, research and "consulting experts" who know about tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

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

When an image is accessed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged 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 screenshots, being edited and being re-captured 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 posted it on has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be retrieved by a data recovery specialist so action can be taken.

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

An Established Method for a New Purpose

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

"And we've tested it, we're collaborating with a company that has decades of expertise in developing technology so we know that this is reliable and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she continued.

She expressed hope she believed the technology would also act as a preventive measure to potential intimate image abusers.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

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

"If that self-blame is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or service who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that self blame can really be reinforced so it's crucial that the support a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is vital to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing technology-enabled abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to tackle this alone, 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 shared around her town. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess endured 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'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of this crime from the victims to the perpetrators. "There is no offence to consensually send an image to someone," stated Jess.

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