'My Face Is Being Used to Sell Things I've Never Heard Of': Hong Kong Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Theft

A secondary school teacher from Tuen Mun found out last March that photographs from her personal Instagram account had been scraped, duplicated and posted across at least three Mainland e-commerce platforms advertising skincare products. She had never agreed to any endorsement. She did not know the brands. And under current cross-border data enforcement arrangements, she had no clear path to force the listings down.

Her experience is not unusual. Duplicate image theft — the wholesale copying and redistribution of personal photographs without consent, typically for commercial gain — has become one of the most frequently raised grievances at community digital rights workshops held across Hong Kong this year. The issue has sharpened since the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance amendments that took effect in 2021, which strengthened some protections but left significant grey zones around images hosted on overseas servers or redistributed through platforms operating outside the city's jurisdiction.

A Problem Surfacing Across Districts

At the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei, a community legal clinic run in partnership with the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation held four Saturday sessions between January and April 2026 specifically addressing image misuse complaints. Organisers say attendance at those sessions roughly doubled compared with the equivalent period in 2025, though they cautioned against reading too much into a single data point. The complaints skewed heavily toward women aged 20 to 45, and a notable share involved images duplicated onto Taobao or Pinduoduo product listings.

On Fa Yuen Street in Mong Kok, a vendor who sells custom phone cases described discovering in February that product photographs he spent hours staging had been lifted wholesale by a competitor operating out of Guangzhou. His images appeared on at least two separate storefronts on a major Mainland platform, watermarks digitally removed. He filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data on 14 February. As of early July, he said the process was still ongoing and the listings remained live.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data received 269 complaints relating to images and doxxing-adjacent issues in 2024, according to its annual report published in early 2025 — a 31 percent increase over the 2022 figure. The Commissioner's office has acknowledged that cross-border enforcement remains a structural constraint, given that many infringing platforms are incorporated outside Hong Kong.

What Victims Are Being Told to Do

Practical advice circulating at community workshops in Yau Ma Tei and on Hong Kong-based Telegram groups tends to cluster around three steps: filing a takedown request directly with the platform using its own reporting mechanism, lodging a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner, and — for commercially significant cases — engaging a solicitor to send a formal letter via the relevant Mainland intellectual property channel. The third route can cost upwards of HK$8,000 in legal fees before any court action, putting it out of reach for many individuals.

The Consumer Council has flagged digital image misuse as a priority issue for its 2026 work programme, citing the intersection of e-commerce growth and inadequate cross-platform accountability. Community groups, including the Digital Rights Initiative Hong Kong, which is based in Sheung Wan, have called for a dedicated rapid-response mechanism within the Privacy Commissioner's office — analogous to the doxxing removal powers introduced under the 2021 amendments — that would apply specifically to commercially exploited duplicate images.

For now, residents facing the problem are advised to document every instance meticulously: screenshot the infringing page with the URL visible, record the date, and note whether the platform has a Hong Kong-accessible reporting portal. Filing with the Privacy Commissioner costs nothing and creates an official record, even when enforcement across borders proves slow. Those with images on public social accounts may also consider enabling watermarking tools — several free options are available through the Apple App Store and Google Play — before the problem arises rather than after.