Image Angel Puts a Forensic Mark on Every Viewer

Image Angel stamps a unique forensic mark into an intimate file each time a viewer opens it, so a later leak can be traced to that account. Madelaine Thomas founded the UK firm in 2024 after clients leaked her photos, and she aimed the tool at dating apps and social platforms.

The first buyers are adult sites trying to stop stolen clips. From 30 September 2026, UK platforms also face a duty to use hash matching, which can block a known file without identifying who posted it.

Every Viewer Leaves a Forensic Trace

The product does not sit on a sender’s camera roll as a consumer filter. It runs on a platform’s servers. When a user opens a photo, video or livestream, the copy they receive is written with an invisible mark tied to that viewing session.

If that copy later turns up on another site, Image Angel says it can pull the mark back out and hand the platform a package: which service the file came from, which account or session opened it, and when. The company puts that match at 90%+ confidence. The original owner’s name is not written into the watermark. Image Angel says it does not keep copies of the images themselves, and that it does not hold extra personal data beyond what a leak report requires.

Thomas, 37, from Monmouthshire, has said the underlying method is not new. Hollywood and sports broadcasters already use forensic marks to find which screening copy of a film or feed was pirated. Her bet is that the same idea can travel with a nude, a paid clip or a private livestream, and still survive screenshots and common edits, including a photo of a screen taken on a second phone.

That last claim is the whole product. Metadata tags fall off the moment someone hits screenshot or uploads to an app that strips file headers. A mark in the pixels is meant to travel with the picture the eye actually sees. Independent work on other pixel watermarks finds they can still be weakened by heavy cropping, strong compression or a determined stripping attack, which is why Thomas told interviewers in December 2025 that the remaining job was to test the system at scale.

Dreams of Spanking Went Live in March

By December 2025 one platform had already adopted the tool, and Thomas said she was in talks with more. The first publicly named live site was Dreams of Spanking, an erotica studio that said in March 2026 it was putting Image Angel marks on hundreds of videos and thousands of stills, plus livestreams. On 8 May 2026 the company’s own account said that site was live, and that one other large unnamed platform was live too.

We’re already live and actively protecting users on @DreamofSpanking, as well as one other *huge* site … launch coming soon https://t.co/Yih79fRvKn

— Image Angel (@ImageAngel_) May 8, 2026

Summer brought named customers in the adult trade. Friends2Follow, the Amsterdam adult social app, said on 17 June 2026 that every piece of paid content would carry a session-tied mark at the moment of access. PinkLabel.TV, the on-demand home of independent queer cinema, said on 21 July 2026 it had wired the same layer through its streaming stack. Image Angel is still a private UK company of under 10 people. The paying beachhead is not Instagram. It is studios and subscription apps whose clips already leak into free tubes and dump groups.

LIVE DEPLOYMENTS

Jean-Micheal Veen, chief executive of Friends2Follow, described the shift in plain commercial terms. Leaks, he said, are not only a privacy harm. They wipe months of creator income once a paid file leaves the paywall.

We’ve always been able to respond to leaks after they happen, but that means the damage is already done. By embedding traceability at the moment of access, we introduce a preventative layer where unauthorized sharing is no longer anonymous.

Jean-Micheal Veen, CEO, Friends2Follow

Pink and White Productions marketing director Jiz Lee made the same pitch for independent queer film: performers should not have to choose between finding an audience and keeping control of the file. Thomas, in the PinkLabel statement, said forensic protection should be part of the viewing experience, not a letter sent after a clip is already everywhere. Friends2Follow also said it was working to plug into StopNCII, the hash database Ofcom now points platforms toward. On that app, a stolen file could in theory carry a viewer mark and also be blocked by fingerprint when it is uploaded somewhere else.

How Image Angel Watermarking Works

Inside a partner site the sequence is short. A viewer hits play or opens a still. The server writes a mark into that copy, unique to the session. The picture on screen looks clean. There is no logo burned into the corner. If someone later pastes the file onto a dump forum, a recovery pass tries to read the pattern back out of the pixels.

EMBED, TRACE, ATTRIBUTE

• Embed: A unique invisible mark is written into the copy at view time and is meant to stay in the file.
• Trace: A leaked copy is scanned for that pattern, including after a crop, a compress or a screenshot.
• Attribute: A hit is meant to return platform ID, session ID and timestamp, at 90%+ confidence, pointing to which account viewed it.

Action after a hit is still a human decision. With the survivor’s permission, Image Angel contacts the host platform and hands over proof that a mark is present plus the account or session ID. The platform can warn the user, suspend the account, or open its own inquiry. Creators can stay unnamed in that loop. Legal action is optional. Thomas has said she wanted something simpler than a court file: a ban on the original platform, and a path to put the same person onto a hashing list so other apps stop dealing with them.

She has also been clear about the limit that product design cannot talk away. If the photo never passed through a partner platform, there is no mark to find. A file sent as a native message, copied off a laptop, or stolen from a cloud folder arrives in the world blank.

Ofcom Now Requires Hash Matching

On 9 September 2026, Ofcom opened an enforcement programme on intimate image abuse and told in-scope services to have hash matching for illegal intimate images in place by 30 September 2026, or to prove another method is just as effective. Firms that fail can be fined up to 10% of global annual revenue. The regulator is still pointing platforms to StopNCII.org, run by the charity SWGfL, which also operates the Revenge Porn Helpline.

THE SCALE OFCOM IS POLICING

• Annual harm: David Wright, SWGfL’s chief executive, said research suggests over 369,000 women in the UK experience this abuse each year.
• The duty: Automated hash matching, or an equally effective system, from 30 September 2026.
• The penalty: Fines up to 10% of global annual revenue for firms that do not meet the legal duties.
• Next rule: A consultation later in 2026 on a 48-hour takedown duty after a report, with outside evidence due by 6 November 2026.

Hashing and watermarking answer different questions. StopNCII lets a person make a hash from an intimate image on their own device. The picture never leaves the phone. Partner apps then compare uploads against that fingerprint, using PDQ and PhotoDNA on stills and MD5 on video, and can block a match. Wright put it as a way to stop a file spreading before it is posted, including an AI-made deepfake the survivor has already hashed. It does not say who first leaked the picture. It only says this file, or something close enough, should not go up again.

TWO TOOLS FOR THE SAME HARM

Almudena Lara, Ofcom’s online safety policy development director, said companies now have a legal responsibility to put the right tools in place to stop this content spreading, and that the enforcement programme is how the regulator will check they did. Image Angel’s own LinkedIn page treated 30 September as a good day for hash matching and then added that forensic watermarking is already available. That is a sales line, but it is also an accurate split: the law’s floor is a fingerprint of the file. The paid extra is a fingerprint of the viewer.

The Business Card Passed Around Parliament

Thomas worked as a dominatrix, mainly online, for 10 years, and has used the name Countess Diamond. She was named Sex Worker of the Year 2024 at the Sexual Freedom Awards. She has said the work felt like any other skilled job, a dominant woman offering her body because she chose to. Clients received private images under an old rule of that trade: what you are sent stays with you.

Someone broke it. She had sent the same set of pictures to more than one person and could not tell which recipient posted them. The files, she has said, were still up. She is not ashamed of the pictures. She is ashamed of how they were used against her by someone she does not know. The fear ran through her children. She has said, on the record, that she considered ending her life because of what the shame could bring to her kids, and that it took years to get past that.

I expect dignity, I expect respect, and I expect trust, and I don’t see why those are negotiable. The fact that those images could be then shared around where I live or with people I love and used to hurt them, that’s beyond, that’s not my choice, that’s not my mistake, that’s someone being an abuser.

Madelaine Thomas, founder of Image Angel, BBC Wales, December 2025

About seven years of campaigning followed the leak: roundtables that fed the 2025 Independent Pornography Review led by Baroness Bertin, arguments over banks closing sex workers’ accounts, and a paper on labour standards in the online adult industry. The Bertin review recommended Image Angel as best practice. Jess Phillips, then the UK minister for safeguarding, has backed the work. The company also took the Innovation in Tech Safety award at Refuge’s Tech Safety Summit. Sharing intimate images without consent is already a criminal offence, with a maximum of up to two years in prison where the law treats the case as the more serious form.

At a parliamentary roundtable on image-based abuse, Thomas handed out Image Angel cards and asked people to pass them around the room until one came back. She held that card up and said fingerprinting could, in principle, name every person who had touched it. That is the product in a prop: the object looks ordinary, and the trail is in the object.

She is not an engineer. She has said she built the company by staying up, reading, and bothering people who already knew how forensic marks work, including a partner firm she described as having 30 years in the field. “I just need a guardian angel” is how she has described the moment the campaigning stopped being enough. She wanted to send a picture and have that be a safe act.

What the Watermark Cannot Catch

A viewer mark only exists where a platform has switched it on. That is a small club. Native camera-roll sharing, ordinary messaging apps and the large social networks named in early explainers are not in the live list. A stolen iCloud folder, a hidden recording, or a still grabbed from an unmarked stream arrives with nothing to read.

WHERE THE MARK STOPS

• Unmarked apps: If the file never passed through a partner site, recovery has no session to name.
• Deepfakes from other photos: A nudify job made from a clothed picture never received an Image Angel mark; hashing that new file is a separate step.
• Hard stripping: The company says common edits leave the pattern; a dedicated removal attack is the open test Thomas still flagged in 2025.
• First share: The mark names a viewer after the leak. It does not freeze the file on the first phone that saves it.

Kate Worthington of the Revenge Porn Helpline has said no single tool, and no single helpline, will cover this harm, and that a stacked response is the only honest one. Thomas’s own hoped-for path after a hit was never watermark-only. She wanted the host to ban the user and then help put that person on a hashing list. In that design the mark is the name, and the hash is the blockade on the next upload.

Adult performers talking among themselves treat the same stack as a money tool. Stolen paid clips are a revenue leak as much as a privacy leak, which is why the live installs landed on a spanking studio, a fan platform and a queer cinema site rather than on a dating app. Tube-scale sites have been wished into the conversation; they have not shown up on the deployment list.

Large Social Apps Have Not Signed On

The original pitch still names dating apps, Instagram and Snapchat as natural homes for a mark applied at view time. None of those names appears on the 2026 live list. Image Angel’s public calendar this year has been trade shows, creator awards and adult platforms asking for installs. In early September Thomas was at the Friends2Follow creator awards, talking to people already watching marked files on that site.

Ofcom’s floor is now in force. Hash matching, or something as effective, is the thing a big consumer app must be able to show a regulator. A forensic viewer mark is a separate purchase, useful to a site that wants to know which paying account screenshotted a clip. Until a mainstream messenger or dating app buys that layer, most private nudes will still travel unmarked, and a leak will still be a file with no session ID in it.

Thomas has kept the simpler demand in view. People should be able to flirt with a photo, she has said, the way they once rolled about in the hay, without treating the sending as the offence. The offence is the redistribution. Her software only starts that argument in rooms where a platform has already paid to listen.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a safety product and on UK rules for intimate image abuse. It is informational only and is not legal advice, a police guide, or a recommendation to buy or install any vendor’s software. Anyone dealing with leaked intimate images should speak to a qualified solicitor or a specialist support service and use official reporting routes rather than acting on this article alone. Figures, live platform lists and regulatory duties reflect the public sources available for this piece and can change as Ofcom, the courts and the companies update their positions.