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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents not at all your standard tech founder. After repeated occurrences of clients leaking her private explicit images, she felt "sufficiently outraged to take action" and looked to technology for answers.

"These were beautiful pictures, I'm unapologetic of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the way that they were used against me by an individual who I have never met," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which uses covert digital tracking to track perpetrators, has won several awards and was cited as exemplary procedure in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

This marks quite a departure from her background in offering consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the world of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, often referred to as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with perpetrators facing up to two years in prison.

It is far from an issue exclusively faced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A report suggests that around 1.42% of the women in the UK is affected by intimate image abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained survivors endured feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you put a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she noted.

"I demand respect, 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 then shared in my community or with my loved ones and used to hurt them, that's unacceptable, that's not a decision I made, that's not my mistake, that's an individual being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been practicing as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "I am as a woman in control, a woman who is confident and powerful, offering my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she said.

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

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I understand that it's bizarre, it's crazy to think that an individual who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a technology firm, but it required someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the loopholes and the modifications that needed to happen," she stated.

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

Understanding the Tech Solution

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

When an image is accessed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged 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 screenshots, being edited and being photographed with a different camera.

It ensures that if you discover your image has been shared without your consent, as long as the platform you posted it on has the technology embedded, the viewer's details will be encoded in the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist so legal steps can follow.

Currently, 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 Hollywood, it already exists in sports broadcasting so this is not brand new technology, it's just a novel use and a new system," said Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're collaborating with a firm that has decades of expertise in tech development so we know that this is solid 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 deterrent to would-be perpetrators.

Changing the Narrative

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

"If that self-blame is reinforced 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 a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to solve this problem, not just support services, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when images of her in her underwear were shared around her local community. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later shape her advocacy work.

"It took so long, an excessive amount of time for someone to tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is dedicated to eliminating the shame of this crime from the victims to the offenders. "There is no offence to willingly share an image to someone," stated Jess.

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