'My whole history, just gone': Canberra residents speak out on duplicate image replacement

Karalyn, a public servant of 14 years who works near Barton, opened her department's internal staff directory last month to find her profile photo had been replaced with a stock image of someone she didn't recognise. She hadn't been notified. Her access credentials still worked. The image had simply changed. She isn't alone.

Across Canberra, residents are reporting a pattern of what they're calling duplicate image replacement — cases where personal photographs stored on government portals, university systems, and community-facing platforms are silently overwritten, duplicated to wrong accounts, or swapped with generic placeholders. The problem cuts across sectors, touching public servants in Civic, students at the Australian National University in Acton, and community health workers logging into ACT Health systems from clinics in Belconnen and Tuggeranong.

The issue is drawing attention now partly because of how digital identity management has been restructured across federal agencies since the rollout of the myGov app update in early 2026, which consolidated profile data across multiple linked services. Advocates say that consolidation, while convenient on paper, created new points of failure where image metadata could be misattributed during synchronisation events.

A problem with real-world consequences

For some people, the consequences are more than cosmetic. A community health worker based at the Belconnen Community Health Centre on Lathlain Street described arriving at a home visit in April to find a client who refused to let her in — the client had been sent an outdated duplicate photo from the booking system that showed someone entirely different, raising safeguarding concerns on both sides. The worker said the mix-up took three weeks to formally resolve through ACT Health's digital services team.

At the University of Canberra in Bruce, students in the Faculty of Health have raised concerns with the student association about profile images appearing on the wrong course enrolment pages within the student portal. The UC Student Association logged at least six formal complaints between February and June 2026, according to a summary shared at the association's June general meeting. The university's IT helpdesk has reportedly been working through a backlog since a platform migration completed in March.

ANU students in Acton have reported similar experiences through the university's Wattle learning management system, where uploaded profile images occasionally surface on peer-review submissions attributed to the wrong student — a problem with academic integrity implications if left unresolved.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, last updated in 2024, commits agencies to maintaining accurate identity data across integrated platforms, but community advocates say the enforcement mechanism for that commitment is unclear. A Gungahlin-based digital rights group that meets monthly at the Gungahlin Library on Anthony Rolfe Avenue has been documenting community reports since January, and by late June had collected accounts from more than 40 Canberra residents across at least seven different platforms.

What affected residents can do now

Consumer advocates familiar with ACT digital services say the most direct remedy currently available to affected residents is lodging a formal data correction request under the Privacy Act 1988, citing section 20 — the right to request correction of personal information held by an agency. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in Cootamundra Street, Forrest, handles complaints for federal agencies, while the ACT Human Rights Commission on Knowles Place in Civic covers territory-level bodies including ACT Health and the Education Directorate.

The practical advice circulating in online community forums — including the Canberra Community Board Facebook group, which has more than 28,000 members — is to screenshot all instances of the error before requesting correction, and to keep a dated record of every support ticket raised. That documentation matters if a complaint eventually escalates.

For university students, both ANU and UC have student ombudsman processes that sit outside IT helpdesks and can apply additional pressure. The National Tertiary Education Union's ACT branch has flagged it is monitoring whether the problem is affecting casual academic staff whose employment documentation is tied to the same profile systems.

Karalyn, for her part, got her photo restored after 11 days and two escalated help tickets. She wants to know why it happened in the first place. So do a lot of people across this city.