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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas is not at all your standard startup entrepreneur. After repeated instances of clients distributing her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to do something about it" and looked to tech solutions for a solution.

"These were striking images, I'm unapologetic of the photographs, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were used against me by someone who I don't know," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year after launching her venture, Image Angel, which employs covert digital tracking to track perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was recommended as exemplary procedure in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

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

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 not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the adult entertainment sector. A study indicates that approximately 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse each year.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, said survivors lived with feelings of humiliation. "In my view a lot of people will comment, 'you shared a private image out on the internet, what do you anticipate?'," she noted.

"I expect dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she added. "The fact that those images could be subsequently distributed 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 professional dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a dominant woman, a woman who is confident and powerful, offering my body as a treat to someone because I wish to," she described.

"Some believe it's unusual but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an accountant giving advice," she added.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the world of tech. "I understand 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 took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the flaws and the changes that were necessary," she explained.

She insisted she was not in the least bit techy 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 used by any digital service where people exchange photos, for instance dating apps, social networks and online sites.

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

This covert marker is encoded within the copy of the image itself and can survive screenshots, being edited and being re-captured with a secondary device.

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

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

Proven Technology, New Application

"The system is already in use in Hollywood, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a new application and a new system," explained Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a firm 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 added.

She said she hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be perpetrators.

Changing the Narrative

An expert from a support service said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt this abuse caused for victims.

"If that self-blame is reinforced by a uninformed acquaintance or service who says 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be deepened so it's really important that the response a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She noted it was fantastic that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, adding: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing technology-enabled abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to tackle this alone, not just support services, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when photographs of her in her underwear were shared around her town. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It required years, too long for someone to say to me, 'it wasn't your fault' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of this crime from the victims to the perpetrators. "There is no offence to willingly share an photo to someone," stated Jess.

"But it is a crime to circulate that non-consensually and I think that should invariably be where the responsibility is," she concluded.