Hong Kong's War on Duplicate Images: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Hong Kong's digital governance community is grappling with a deceptively unglamorous problem: the mass proliferation of duplicate images embedded across public-facing databases, court documents, land registry records and government information portals — and what to do about them. The issue, long treated as a backend housekeeping matter, has moved closer to the front of policy conversations in 2026 as the city accelerates its Smart City Blueprint implementation and prepares for a mid-year audit of its digital public infrastructure.

The timing matters. Hong Kong's government formally adopted Smart City Blueprint 2.0 several years ago, and the Digital Policy Office, established in 2023 and headquartered in the Central Government Offices complex in Tamar, has since taken on a coordinating role across bureaus. Duplicate or mismatched imagery in official records is not merely a storage problem — it creates verification failures, slows e-government services and, in legal contexts, raises chain-of-custody questions about documentary evidence. With the city's courts increasingly processing filings electronically through the eLitigation platform, the stakes have grown.

What the Specialists Are Arguing

Technology consultants advising Hong Kong agencies have pointed to several compounding factors. The Land Registry, based in Queensway Government Offices in Admiralty, maintains image records stretching back decades. When analogue archives were digitised in overlapping tranches — some as early as the mid-1990s, others more recently — duplicate image files were baked in from the start. The Buildings Department, which processes thousands of minor works and occupation permit applications annually through its BRAVO system, faces a similar legacy burden.

Practitioners in the legal tech sector, including firms operating out of co-working spaces along Wyndham Street in Central, have flagged that the problem is not confined to government. Law firms managing large litigation files routinely encounter duplicate exhibit images that inflate bundle sizes and complicate court submissions. Under Practice Direction SL1, which governs electronic court bundles in Hong Kong's High Court, parties are already required to avoid unnecessary duplication — but enforcement relies on self-policing.

The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, known as ASTRI and based in the Hong Kong Science Park in Pak Shek Kok, has published research into hash-based deduplication approaches suited to Cantonese-language document workflows. Industry participants say ASTRI's frameworks are technically sound but have not yet been formally adopted across major government bureaus.

Numbers That Frame the Debate

The Digital Policy Office has not published a consolidated figure for the volume of duplicate image files across government systems, making independent benchmarking difficult. However, the Innovation and Technology Bureau's 2024-25 annual report noted that the government's central data platform held more than 2,400 open datasets — a figure that, given typical upload practices, implies significant image redundancy across portals such as data.gov.hk.

Storage costs are a secondary but real concern. Government cloud expenditure has grown year-on-year, and duplicate files impose measurable overhead on retrieval times for citizen-facing services including the iAM Smart identity platform, which recorded over 8 million registered users by early 2026. Even marginal efficiency gains from deduplication could translate into faster page loads and lower per-transaction costs at scale.

Legal professionals note an additional dimension: under Hong Kong's Evidence Ordinance, the integrity of a digital image as an exhibit can be challenged if the provenance of a specific file version is unclear. Where duplicate images with different metadata timestamps exist in a case file, that ambiguity is exploitable.

The Digital Policy Office is expected to release updated data management guidelines for bureaus and departments before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Technology advisers recommend that any incoming framework mandate SHA-256 checksums at point of ingest for all official image uploads, establish a centralised deduplication registry for high-volume departments such as the Land Registry and Buildings Department, and provide clear guidance under Practice Direction SL1 for legal practitioners managing electronic exhibits. For businesses and law firms filing documents through the eLitigation or BRAVO platforms, the practical advice in the interim is straightforward: audit your image libraries now, before regulatory requirements make it compulsory.