From BDSM Practitioner to Technology Entrepreneur: A Unique Battle Against Revenge Porn

Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas is not at all your standard tech founder. After multiple instances of clients leaking her private explicit images, she was "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and looked to tech solutions for a solution.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm unapologetic of the pictures, I'm ashamed of the manner that they were used against me by someone who I have never met," stated Madelaine.

Just over a year since launching her venture, Image Angel, which employs covert digital tracking to identify perpetrators, has won several awards and was cited as best practice in an government-commissioned study recently.

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

A Widespread Issue

Intimate image abuse, often referred to as image-based abuse, is a criminal offence with perpetrators facing up to two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue exclusively faced by those in the sex industry. A study indicates that approximately 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained survivors lived with feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she said.

"I expect dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she added. "The reality that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with my loved ones and used to hurt them, that's beyond, that's not my choice, that's not an error on my part, that's an individual being an abuser."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been practicing as a dominatrix, mainly online, for 10 years and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "It's me as a woman in control, a woman who is empowered and strong, giving my body as a gift to someone of my own volition," she said.

"People think it's strange but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an financial advisor giving advice," she remarked.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I know that it's bizarre, it's remarkable to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a tech company, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the flaws and the changes that were necessary," she stated.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was managed to build her company after many sleepless nights, investigation and "bugging people" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

Image Angel can be implemented on any digital service where people share images, for instance dating apps, social media and websites.

When an image is viewed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged with an undetectable digital marker which is unique to them.

This invisible watermark is embedded into the digital file of the image itself and can survive screenshots, being edited and being photographed with a different camera.

It means that if you find out your image has been shared non-consensually, providing the service you used has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be encoded in 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 several more.

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 an untested concept, it's just a new application and a different framework," explained Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're partnering with a company that has decades of expertise in tech development so we know that this is reliable and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she added.

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 said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt this abuse inflicted on victims.

"If that self-blame is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or professional who says 'what did you expect?' that self blame can really be reinforced so it's really important that the support a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was using her experience to create solutions, adding: "It is really important to have this comprehensive strategy towards addressing technology-enabled 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 only fifteen when images of her in her underwear were shared around her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured 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, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the victims to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to consensually send an image to someone," said Jess.

"However, it is illegal to circulate that without consent and I think that should invariably be where the responsibility is," she affirmed.