'We just want our faces back': Canberrans speak out on the duplicate image problem hitting online records

Sue Harrington noticed something was wrong when she tried to renew her Access Canberra services card in May. The Gungahlin resident had uploaded a portrait photo as required, but when her card arrived, it carried someone else's face entirely — a woman she had never met. She was not alone.

Across Canberra, residents dealing with online portals run by territory and federal agencies have reported a quiet but disorienting problem: duplicate images — photos belonging to one person being attached to another person's record. The issue has surfaced across at least three separate administrative contexts in recent months, touching residents in suburbs from Belconnen to Tuggeranong.

The problem matters now partly because of timing. A wave of federal public servants has been renewing credentials and identity documents after the Australian Public Service Commission updated its staff onboarding requirements in early 2026, pushing tens of thousands of Canberra-based employees through digital verification systems simultaneously. That volume, community members say, appears to have exposed fragilities in image-handling pipelines that connect agency databases.

Frustration on the ground

At the Belconnen Community Service on Swanson Court, staff say they have fielded an unusual number of inquiries since April from residents unsure whether their identity documents are compromised or simply misfiled. The service, which helps residents navigate government paperwork, logged the issue internally after noticing repeat visits from people describing identical problems.

One resident who works at a Northbourne Avenue agency and asked not to be named said he spent eleven weeks trying to get a duplicate photo removed from his myGov-linked health record. He eventually succeeded after escalating to the Services Australia complaints pathway, but described the process as exhausting. He is one of several Canberra workers to have raised the problem through the Community and Public Sector Union's member assistance line, according to publicly available notes from a July 2026 CPSU members' bulletin.

The Australian National University's student portal has also been cited by students living in the Acton and Bruce corridors. Graduate students in particular, who juggle university IDs with concurrent Access Canberra and ATO digital identities, say the crossover between multiple credential systems creates the conditions for image duplication. ANU's IT services desk declined to comment for this article, and no official figure for the number of affected accounts has been released publicly.

What the data suggests

Digital rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia noted in a June 2026 submission to the federal Attorney-General's Department that image-metadata handling in shared government identity infrastructure remains an under-regulated area, with no single mandatory standard governing how agencies store, transfer, or overwrite biometric photographs. That submission is publicly available on the Attorney-General's website.

Access Canberra's online services portal processed roughly 1.4 million transactions in the 2024-25 financial year, according to the ACT Government's annual report published in October 2025. Even a fractional error rate in image assignment across that volume translates to potentially thousands of mismatched records. The ACT Government has not confirmed whether a specific audit of image data is underway.

For residents wanting to check whether their own records are affected, the most direct path is logging into Access Canberra at access.act.gov.au and navigating to the profile section, where a displayed photo can be compared against the document on file. Federal records linked through myGov require a separate check via the individual agency — Services Australia, the ATO, or Medicare — each of which has its own photo management interface.

Anyone who finds a mismatch should file a formal identity correction request rather than simply re-uploading a photo, because the underlying record linking the image to the account also needs to be corrected. The CPSU's member assistance service at its Canberra office on Moore Street has indicated it can help public servants navigate the process. Privacy advocates suggest keeping a screenshot of any mismatched display as evidence before initiating a correction, in case the error disappears without formal acknowledgment.

The ACT Government and Services Australia were both contacted for comment ahead of publication. Neither had responded by deadline.