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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies far from your typical tech founder. After repeated instances of individuals leaking her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to do something about it" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

"Those were striking images, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm ashamed of the way that they were used against me by an individual who I don't know," said Madelaine.

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

This marks a significant shift from her previous career in offering consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the realms of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

The non-consensual sharing of private images, often referred to as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with offenders risking two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue exclusively faced by those in the sex industry. A study suggests that around 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 said.

"I demand dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, and I don't see why those are up for debate," she added. "The reality that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with people I love and employed to cause them pain, that's beyond, that's not a decision I made, that's not my mistake, that's an individual committing abuse."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, primarily online, for a decade and always 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 described.

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

She welcomes being something of an anomaly in the world of tech. "I understand that it's unconventional, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a founder 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 stated.

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

How Does the Technology Work?

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

When an image is accessed by a user, it is seamlessly tagged with an invisible forensic watermark which is specific to that viewer.

This covert marker is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can survive screenshots, being edited and being re-captured with a different camera.

It ensures that if you discover your image has been circulated non-consensually, as long as the platform you used has the system integrated, the viewer's details will be encoded in the image and can be retrieved by a data recovery specialist so action can be taken.

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

Proven Technology, New Application

"This technology already exists in Hollywood, it already exists 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 firm that has decades of expertise in developing technology so we are confident that this is solid and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she added.

She said she believed the technology would also act as a deterrent to potential intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

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

"If that self-blame is reinforced by a misinformed friend or professional who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's really important that the support a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she emphasized.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was using her experience to bring about change, adding: "It is really important to have this comprehensive strategy towards tackling technology-enabled 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 integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in a state of undress were shared around her local community. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess experienced in her youth that would later shape her advocacy work.

"It required years, an excessive amount of time for someone to tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," recalled Jess.

She too is dedicated to 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," stated Jess.

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