'They used our faces without asking': Ballaratians speak out on image duplication

A Ballarat grandmother found her late husband's portrait — taken at a Sovereign Hill anniversary event in 2023 — reproduced on a tourism website she had never heard of. A student from Federation University discovered a photo of herself taken at the Ballarat Begonia Festival had been cropped and repurposed for a commercial lifestyle blog. Neither had been asked. Neither had consented.

Duplicate image use — the copying and redistribution of photographs without the original subject's knowledge — has emerged as a live concern in Ballarat, where a strong culture of community events, heritage photography, and regional tourism promotion means images of residents circulate widely across government, council, and third-party digital channels.

A problem sharpened by digital volume

The issue matters now partly because of scale. The proliferation of social media, tourism aggregator sites, and AI-assisted image libraries has made it easier than ever to lift a photograph from one context and plant it in another. For a city like Ballarat — where Sovereign Hill, the Ballarat Art Gallery on Lydiard Street, and Visit Victoria promotional campaigns regularly generate large volumes of community event photography — the risk of a resident's face appearing somewhere unexpected is not theoretical.

Community members spoken to by The Daily Ballarat described a mix of surprise, frustration, and, in some cases, genuine distress. One woman said she first noticed her image had been duplicated when a friend sent her a screenshot from a wellness brand's Instagram account. The original photo, she said, had been taken at an event in Sturt Street. She had not signed any release form and had not been approached for permission before or after.

Another resident — a retiree who volunteers regularly with the Ballarat Photographic Society on Doveton Street North — described discovering that several images he had personally taken at local events had been scraped and reused on commercial stock sites, sometimes with watermarks from organisations he had no connection to. His original files, he said, included embedded metadata identifying him as the photographer. That metadata had been stripped.

Under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), organisations with an annual turnover above $3 million are required to comply with the Australian Privacy Principles, which cover the collection and use of personal information including photographs that identify individuals. Smaller organisations and sole traders are generally exempt, a gap that advocates have flagged repeatedly to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. A review of the Privacy Act, which the federal government has been progressing since 2023, has canvassed whether that small-business exemption should be narrowed or removed.

What Ballarat residents are being told to do

The practical advice from digital rights organisations is consistent: document everything. If you find your image has been used without consent, take a timestamped screenshot, note the URL, and send a written takedown request citing the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), which vests copyright in the photographer — or, in some cases involving portrait commissions, the subject. If the operator is based in Australia and the image identifies you, a complaint to the OAIC is also an option, though the process can be slow.

The City of Ballarat's own events team publishes a photography notice on its website advising attendees at council-organised activities that images may be taken and used in promotional materials. Critics say that notice is easy to miss and that opt-out mechanisms are not clearly explained. The council did not respond to questions before deadline.

For those who have had images taken at locations like the Ballarat Botanical Gardens on Wendouree Parade or at Federation University's Mount Helen campus, the starting point is finding out who ran the original event, whether a media release was signed, and whether the downstream user obtained the image directly from the event organiser or from a third-party platform.

Ballarat's heritage identity makes this city a frequent backdrop for photographic content. That same visibility, residents say, is precisely why clearer community standards — and faster institutional responses — are overdue.