'My face is everywhere — but it's not me': Hong Kong residents speak out on duplicate image theft

A logistics coordinator from Kwun Tong found her LinkedIn profile photograph listed on at least three separate stock-image websites earlier this year, each selling the image under a different name and nationality. She had never uploaded the photo anywhere except a professional networking platform. She is not alone.

Duplicate image replacement — the practice of scraping, cloning or repurposing someone's photograph and redistributing it, often through AI-assisted tools that alter skin tone, hair or background to evade detection — has become a quiet but growing grievance across Hong Kong's digital community. With the city's workforce among the most online-active in Asia, and with emigration since 2020 pushing hundreds of thousands of residents onto foreign professional platforms to maintain career networks, the exposure window has widened sharply.

A problem with local texture

The Consumer Council, based in Wan Chai, logged a measurable rise in complaints related to unauthorised use of personal images during 2025, according to its annual report published in March 2026. The council recorded 214 image-related digital misuse complaints over the twelve months — a category that did not exist as a standalone classification before 2023. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, headquartered in Causeway Bay, confirmed in the same period that photographic data now accounts for roughly one-in-five of all data breach enquiries received, up from under ten percent in 2021.

Community members in Sham Shui Po, a district with dense concentrations of small retail and wholesale businesses that rely on product photography, describe discovering their catalogue images listed on Mainland Chinese e-commerce platforms under rival shop names. One wholesale fabric trader on Nam Cheong Street said he recognised his own warehouse interior — a distinctive yellow-painted staircase visible in the background — in a competitor's promotional material posted on a cross-border sales channel. He could not act quickly because jurisdictional questions under existing Hong Kong copyright law made the process of filing a formal complaint slow and uncertain.

Digital rights advocates point to a structural gap. Hong Kong's Copyright Ordinance (Cap. 528), last substantively amended in 2022, does not contain explicit provisions addressing AI-generated image duplication or synthetic facial replacement. That means complainants must route grievances through the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance instead, a longer and less direct legal path when the harm is commercial rather than purely reputational.

What affected residents are doing

Some residents have turned to practical, low-tech countermeasures. Photography studios in Mong Kok's Fa Yuen Street area report a small but noticeable uptick in clients requesting watermarked headshots specifically designed to frustrate automated scraping. One studio owner near the corner of Sai Yeung Choi Street South said demand for what the shop calls "anti-clone packages" — headshots embedded with near-invisible metadata anchors — has grown steadily since late 2025, though he declined to give specific figures.

The Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre (HKCERT), which operates under the Hong Kong Productivity Council in Kowloon Bay, issued a practical advisory in May 2026 recommending that users conduct reverse-image searches of their own professional photographs at least quarterly. The advisory also urged residents to restrict image resolution on publicly accessible profiles where platform settings allow it.

Legal advisers at several Sheung Wan-based law firms suggest affected individuals document every instance of misuse with dated screenshots before filing with the Privacy Commissioner, since the evidentiary burden under the current ordinance falls on the complainant. Processing times for formal investigations currently average between four and six months, according to the commissioner's office's 2025 performance figures.

For the Kwun Tong coordinator, the immediate step was straightforward but exhausting: she submitted takedown requests to all three stock platforms in January, and two complied within a fortnight. The third, hosted outside Hong Kong's jurisdiction, has not responded. She has since restricted her profile photo to connections-only. It is an adjustment she describes as unwelcome but, for now, necessary.