🔗 Share this article

Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas is far from your average tech founder. Following repeated instances of individuals distributing her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to do something about it" and looked to technology for answers.

"Those were striking images, I'm not ashamed of the photographs, I'm ashamed of the way that they were weaponized by an individual who I have never met," said Madelaine.

Just over a year after launching her venture, Image Angel, which employs covert digital tracking to track abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was recommended as best practice in an government-commissioned study recently.

This marks quite a departure from her previous career in providing consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the world of kink and bondage.

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 uniquely experienced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A study suggests that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by intimate image abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, said survivors endured feelings of humiliation. "In my view a lot of people will comment, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she noted.

"I expect respect, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she added. "The fact that those images could be then shared in my community 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, mainly online, for 10 years and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "It's me as a dominant woman, a woman who is confident and powerful, giving my body as a treat to someone because I wish to," she said.

"People think it's unusual but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an accountant providing a service," she remarked.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the world of tech. "I know 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 been through it to know the loopholes and the changes that were necessary," she stated.

She insisted she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after a lot of late nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who know about 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 websites.

When an image is accessed by a viewer, it is automatically embedded with an invisible forensic watermark which is specific to that viewer.

This covert marker is encoded within the digital file of the image itself and can withstand screenshots, being altered and being photographed with a secondary device.

It ensures that if you discover your image has been circulated non-consensually, as long as the service you posted it on has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a forensic expert so legal steps can follow.

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

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"The system is already in use in Hollywood, it already exists in live television so this is not brand new technology, it's just a novel use and a different framework," said Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're collaborating with a company that has decades of expertise in developing technology 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 hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to potential intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

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

"If that self-blame 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 reinforced so it's really important that the response somebody is provided with is that they have committed no error," she emphasized.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to bring about change, adding: "It is vital to have this multi-layered approach towards tackling technology-enabled abuse, because no one tool 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 only fifteen when photographs of her in her underwear were shared around her town. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It took so long, an excessive amount of time for someone to say to me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of this crime from the victims to the perpetrators. "There is no offence to consensually send an photo to someone," stated Jess.

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