🔗 Share this article

Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas represents far from your standard tech founder. After repeated occurrences of clients distributing her private explicit images, she was "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to tech solutions for a solution.

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

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

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

The Pervasive Problem

The non-consensual sharing of private images, commonly known as image-based abuse, is a punishable crime with offenders risking two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A report suggests that approximately 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained victims lived with feelings of humiliation. "In my view a lot of people will say, 'you put a private image out on the internet, what do you expect?'," 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 then shared where I live or with people I love and used to hurt them, 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 10 years and always found her work liberating and satisfying. "I am 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 strange but I don't see it any differently to a personal trainer or an financial advisor giving advice," she added.

She embraces being a unique figure in the technology sector. "I know that it's unconventional, 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 understand the loopholes and the modifications that were necessary," she stated.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was managed to build her company after many late nights, research and "bugging people" who understand tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

Image Angel can be implemented on any online platform where people share images, for instance social connection apps, social media and online sites.

When an image is accessed by a user, it is automatically embedded with an undetectable digital marker which is specific to that viewer.

This invisible watermark is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can survive screen shots, being edited and being re-captured with a secondary device.

It means that if you discover your image has been shared non-consensually, as long as the platform you used has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist 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 is already in use in the film industry, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a novel use and a different framework," explained Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a firm that has 30 years experience 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 believed the technology would also act as a preventive measure to potential perpetrators.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An expert from a leading helpline commented she had seen directly the panic, distress and self-blame this abuse inflicted on victims.

"When that guilt is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or service who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's really important that the support somebody is provided with is that they have not done anything wrong," she stated.

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

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when images of her in her underwear were circulated within her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her youth that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

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

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

"But it is a crime to distribute that non-consensually and I think that should always be where the blame is," she affirmed.