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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas embodies far from your standard startup entrepreneur. After repeated instances of individuals distributing her intimate photographs, she felt "angry enough to take action" and looked to tech solutions for answers.

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

Just over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which uses covert digital tracking to identify perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This represents quite a departure from her previous career in offering BDSM services, dominating clients in the realms of kink and bondage.

A Widespread Issue

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

It is not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A report indicates that around 1.42% of the women in the UK is affected by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained victims endured shame and stigma. "In my view a lot of people will comment, 'you put a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she said.

"I expect respect, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, and I don't see why those are negotiable," she continued. "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 an error on my part, that's someone being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for 10 years 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 of my own volition," she said.

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

She embraces being a unique figure in the technology sector. "I know that it's unconventional, it's remarkable to think that an individual who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a tech company, but it took someone who has been through it to know the loopholes and the changes that were necessary," she explained.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after many late nights, research and "bugging people" 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 networks and websites.

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

This invisible watermark is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can survive screen shots, being altered and being photographed with a secondary device.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been shared non-consensually, as long as the platform you posted it on has the technology embedded, 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 implemented 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 live television so this is not brand new technology, it's just a novel use and a new system," 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 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 said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt this abuse inflicted on victims.

"If that self-blame is reinforced by a uninformed acquaintance or professional who says 'what did you expect?' 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 stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to bring about change, saying: "It is vital to have this comprehensive strategy towards tackling 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 integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in her underwear were shared around her local community. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess experienced 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 tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of this crime from the survivors to the offenders. "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 invariably be where the blame is," she affirmed.