Stolen Faces, Stolen Stories: Melbourne Community Members Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

A Sunshine West mother opened a local community Facebook group last month to find her daughter's school portrait staring back at her — attached to a profile she had never seen before. The image had been lifted, cropped, and used as a profile picture by an account promoting a loan service. Her daughter is 11 years old.

The practice known as duplicate image replacement — where original photos are scraped from social media, community forums or local business listings, then reused or substituted across unrelated digital platforms — is drawing mounting frustration from Melbourne residents who say the problem has accelerated through 2025 and into this year. Community groups in at least four inner and western suburbs have flagged the issue to local councillors and digital rights organisations in recent weeks.

A Problem Hitting Multicultural Communities Hard

The concern is particularly acute in Melbourne's migrant-heavy western and northern suburbs, where community members say cultural and language barriers make it harder to identify when an image has been misappropriated and harder still to navigate the formal complaints process. The Western Community Legal Centre, based in Footscray, confirmed it has received a growing number of inquiries relating to unauthorised image use over the past six months, though it declined to provide a specific figure. Staff there have been directing affected residents toward the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which handles complaints under the Privacy Act 1988.

A Vietnamese community group that meets weekly at the Footscray Community Arts Centre on Moreland Street says several of its members discovered their business headshots — originally posted to Google Maps reviews or local trader directories — had been replaced on those same platforms with stock imagery or competitor photos. The effect, they say, is that their hard-built online reputations have been quietly erased. One small business owner in Braybrook described realising her original image on a local trades listing had been substituted, with her star ratings still visible but her face gone. She only found out when a regular customer said they almost couldn't find her again.

The Fitzroy-based digital rights advocacy group Digital Rights Watch has noted duplicate image misuse as part of a broader pattern of what the organisation calls non-consensual image manipulation, a category that sits uneasily within current Australian law. Under the Privacy Act, individuals have limited direct recourse unless they can prove the organisation that published their image is covered by the Act — a threshold that excludes many small operators and overseas platforms.

What the Data Suggests and What Comes Next

The eSafety Commissioner's 2025 annual report recorded a 34 percent increase in image-based abuse complaints compared to the previous year, a figure that advocates say underrepresents the full scale because many affected people don't know where to report. The Commissioner's office has a formal complaints pathway, but the process can take up to 90 days for an initial assessment.

At a community tech literacy session held at the Collingwood Library on Hoddle Street in late June, facilitators from RMIT University's Digital Equity Lab walked about 30 residents through how to run reverse image searches on Google Images and TinEye to check whether their photos had been duplicated elsewhere online. Staff suggested checking at least once every three months, particularly for anyone with images attached to a local business listing or a community group. They also recommended watermarking personal or professional photos before uploading, and setting social media profiles to private where practical.

Residents can lodge complaints about image misuse with the eSafety Commissioner at esafety.gov.au, or contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner for privacy-related concerns. The Western Community Legal Centre offers free legal advice on Mondays and Thursdays at its Footscray office on Nicholson Street. For those who discover their image has been replaced on a platform like Google Maps, a direct edit request through the platform's feedback tool remains the fastest available option — though community members warn response times vary widely.

The Sunshine West mother said she filed a report with eSafety within 24 hours of discovering her daughter's image. Three weeks later, she was still waiting to hear back.