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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas is far from your average tech founder. Following repeated occurrences of clients distributing her private explicit images, she felt "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to technology for answers.

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

Little over a year since launching her venture, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was recommended as best practice in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

This represents a significant shift from her background in offering consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the world of BDSM.

A Widespread Issue

The non-consensual sharing of private images, often referred to as image-based abuse, is a criminal offence with offenders facing up to two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A study indicates that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by this form of abuse each year.

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

"I expect dignity, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I fail to understand why those are up for debate," she continued. "The fact 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 committing abuse."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and consistently found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a dominant woman, a woman who is confident and powerful, offering my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she described.

"Some believe it's strange but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an accountant providing a service," she added.

She welcomes being a unique figure in the technology sector. "I understand that it's bizarre, it's remarkable to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a technology firm, but it required someone who has been through it to know the loopholes and the changes that needed to happen," she explained.

She insisted she was not technically inclined and was managed to build her company after many sleepless nights, research and "bugging people" who understand tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

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

When an image is accessed by a viewer, 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 screen shots, being edited and being re-captured with a secondary device.

It means that if you find out your image has been circulated non-consensually, providing the service you posted it on has the system integrated, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist so action can be taken.

Currently, one service has implemented her tech and she's in talks with several more.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

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

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

She said she hoped the technology would also act as a preventive measure to potential intimate image abusers.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An advocate from a support service commented she had seen directly the trauma and guilt this abuse inflicted on victims.

"When that guilt is reinforced 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 committed no error," she stated.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is vital 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, no one helpline, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when images of her in a state of undress were circulated within her town. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured in her youth that would later inform her advocacy work.

"It required years, an excessive amount of time for someone to say to me, 'it wasn't your fault' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of intimate image abuse from the victims to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to willingly share an image to someone," said Jess.

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