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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents not at all your standard tech founder. After repeated instances of individuals distributing her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to take action" and looked to tech solutions for answers.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm ashamed of the manner that they were weaponized by someone who I don't know," explained Madelaine.

Little over a year since founding her venture, Image Angel, which uses covert digital tracking to identify perpetrators, has won several awards and was recommended as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

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

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as image-based abuse, is a punishable crime with perpetrators facing up to two years in prison.

It is far from an issue exclusively faced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A study suggests that approximately 1.42% of the UK female population is affected 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 shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she noted.

"I expect respect, 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 where I live 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 someone being an abuser."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for 10 years and consistently found her work liberating and satisfying. "I am as a dominant woman, 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 unusual but I don't see it any differently 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 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 understand the loopholes and the changes that needed to happen," she stated.

She maintained she was not technically inclined and was able to build her company after a lot of late nights, investigation and "bugging people" who understand tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

Image Angel can be used by any digital service where people share images, for instance social connection apps, social media and online sites.

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 copy of the image itself and can withstand screen shots, being edited and being re-captured with a secondary device.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been circulated without your consent, as long as the service you used has the system integrated, the sharer's information will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist so legal steps can follow.

To date, one service 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 is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, 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 deploy it widely," she continued.

She expressed hope she believed the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be intimate image abusers.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An expert from a support service said she had seen first-hand the trauma and guilt intimate image abuse caused for victims.

"When that guilt is compounded by a uninformed acquaintance or service 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 response somebody is provided with is that they have committed no error," she emphasized.

She noted it was fantastic that Madelaine was using her experience to create solutions, saying: "It is vital 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, not just support services, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when photographs of her in her underwear were circulated within her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

"It required years, too long for someone to tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," said Jess.

She too is dedicated to eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the survivors to the perpetrators. "It isn't a crime 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.