🔗 Share this article

Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas is not at all your typical tech founder. Following multiple occurrences of clients distributing her private explicit images, she felt "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and turned to technology for a solution.

"Those were striking images, I'm unapologetic of the photographs, I'm ashamed of the way that they were used against me by an individual who I have never met," explained Madelaine.

Just over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to identify perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an government-commissioned study recently.

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

The Pervasive Problem

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

It is far from 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 intimate image abuse on an annual basis.

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

"I expect respect, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, and I fail to understand why those are up for debate," she continued. "The fact that those images could be subsequently distributed where I live or with people I love and employed to cause them pain, that's unacceptable, that's not my choice, that's not my mistake, that's an individual being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been practicing as a professional dominatrix, primarily online, for a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a dominant woman, a woman who is empowered and strong, offering my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she described.

"Some believe it's strange but I don't see it any differently to a nutritionist or an financial advisor giving advice," she added.

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I understand that it's bizarre, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a technology firm, but it took someone who has been through it to know the flaws and the modifications that needed to happen," she explained.

She insisted she was not technically inclined and was managed to build her company after a lot of sleepless nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

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

When an image is accessed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged with an invisible forensic watermark which is unique to them.

This covert marker is encoded within the copy of the image itself and can withstand screenshots, being altered and being re-captured with a different camera.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been shared without your consent, as long as the service you posted it on has the system integrated, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be retrieved by a data recovery specialist so action can be taken.

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

Proven Technology, New Application

"This technology already exists in the film industry, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, 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 30 years experience 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 said she hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be perpetrators.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

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

"When that guilt is reinforced by a misinformed friend or service who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's really important that the response a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she emphasized.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, saying: "It is vital to have this comprehensive strategy towards addressing tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to tackle this alone, no one helpline, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when photographs of her in her underwear were shared around her town. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It took so long, too long for someone to say to me, 'it wasn't your fault' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

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

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