Their Faces, Stolen and Reused: Melbourne Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

A Sunshine West childcare worker discovered her family portrait on a stock-image aggregator site last March. The photo — taken at a Diwali gathering in a Tottenham community hall — had been cropped, watermarked and listed for commercial licensing. She had posted it to a private Facebook group. She had never consented to its use anywhere else.

Her experience is not isolated. Across Melbourne's western and northern suburbs, community members are reporting a growing pattern: personal photographs lifted from social media, neighbourhood Facebook groups and even local council newsletters, then re-uploaded to image databases, advertising materials or, in some cases, used to replace faces in AI-generated content. The practice — loosely described by digital rights advocates as duplicate image replacement — sits in a murky legal space that Australia's existing privacy framework was not designed to address.

A Problem That Has Arrived Quietly

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner handles complaints under the Privacy Act 1988, but community legal centres across Melbourne say the process is slow and the remedies limited. Fitzroy Legal Service, which operates on Johnston Street and provides free legal advice to low-income clients, has seen a rise in inquiries about image misuse over the past 18 months, according to the centre's published caseload updates. The centre advises clients that the act does not cover individuals or small businesses below certain thresholds, meaning many perpetrators fall outside its reach entirely.

The Western Community Legal Centre, based in Footscray, has similarly flagged the issue in its 2025 annual community needs survey, noting that digitally marginalised community members — including newly arrived migrants with limited English — are among the most vulnerable. They are less likely to run reverse-image searches, less likely to know the formal complaints process and less likely to receive timely responses from overseas-based platforms.

At a community meeting held at the Flemington Community Centre on Racecourse Road in late June, around 40 residents gathered to share experiences. One attendee — a Sudanese-Australian man from Kensington — described finding a photograph of his daughter, taken at a school athletics carnival, appearing in an online education advertisement for a company he had never heard of. Another woman from the Brimbank area said an image from her Instagram account, which she had believed was set to private, had been used in a property marketing brochure for a project near Deer Park.

What the Law Currently Covers — and What It Doesn't

Australia does not have a standalone image rights law. The closest federal protection is a proposed tort of serious invasion of privacy, which the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended in its 2023 report but which has not yet been legislated as of July 2026. Victoria's own Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 enshrines the right to privacy, but it applies to public authorities rather than private actors or online platforms.

Advocates point to a practical gap. Platforms like Google and Meta have formal takedown processes, but response times can stretch past 30 days, and there is no financial penalty for the third-party re-uploaders who initially distribute the stolen images. The eSafety Commissioner does have powers under the Online Safety Act 2021 to compel removal of non-consensual intimate images within 72 hours, but that provision does not extend to non-intimate photographs used commercially without consent.

Community members at the Flemington meeting were directed to three immediate steps by a digital rights volunteer from the Coburg-based group Electronic Frontiers Australia: file a reverse-image search using Google Images or TinEye, submit a takedown request directly to the platform citing copyright ownership of the original photograph, and lodge a complaint with the eSafety Commissioner if the image involves a child or is being used to harass. None of those steps, attendees noted, guarantees the image comes down quickly or that the person who uploaded it faces any consequence.

The Victorian government is currently reviewing its digital economy strategy, with submissions open until August 15. Community legal centres are urging residents to add image misuse to those submissions. In the absence of new legislation, the advice is frustratingly practical: audit your privacy settings, watermark photographs before sharing them in any online group and document every instance of misuse with screenshots and URLs before requesting removal.