Stolen Faces, Borrowed Lives: Istanbul Residents Speak Out on the Duplicate Image Crisis

The photograph had been taken on a Tuesday afternoon outside the Çiçek Pasajı on İstiklal Caddesi, snapped by a friend and posted to a personal social media account. Within eight months, it had appeared on at least four different websites — a discount travel portal, a stock image aggregator, a Turkish-language advertisement for a property development in Başakşehir, and a forum thread in a language the subject did not recognise. She found out by accident, running a reverse image search in March 2026. She has not given her name to this newspaper, citing ongoing legal proceedings.

Her case is not unusual. Across Istanbul's densely photographed public spaces — from the fish market at Karaköy to the ferry terminals at Kadıköy — residents are waking up to the scale of what campaigners call the duplicate image problem: photographs of real people, lifted without permission and cycled through commercial and political content pipelines. The issue has sharpened this year as several neighbourhood associations and digital rights groups have begun collecting testimonies and pushing for clearer enforcement of Turkey's existing personal data protection law, known as KVKK, which has been on the books since 2016.

A Problem With a Geography

The complaints cluster around specific kinds of spaces. Tourist-heavy corridors like Sultanahmet and the stretch of Istiklal between Taksim Square and the Galatasaray High School generate enormous volumes of street photography daily. Locals who live or work there say they have little practical control over how images that include them circulate once uploaded. The Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu festival, which drew large crowds to the area earlier this year, produced tens of thousands of shared photographs within days — some featuring identifiable faces in the background with no model releases of any kind.

The Karaköy-based digital rights initiative Veri Hakları Derneği has been logging complaints since 2024. The group says the volume of reports it received in the first quarter of 2026 was roughly double what it recorded across all of 2024, though it declined to publish a full breakdown before a forthcoming report. Separately, Turkey's Personal Data Protection Authority — the Kişisel Verileri Koruma Kurumu, or KVKK board — fined 47 organisations a combined 12.4 million Turkish lira in 2025 for various data protection violations, according to figures published on the authority's official website. Image misuse cases made up a portion of those findings, though the board does not break complaints into subcategories in its public releases.

In Kadıköy, a neighbourhood association operating out of the Moda district has been running informal advice sessions on Thursday evenings, helping residents understand how to file takedown requests with Turkish and international platforms. Attendance has grown steadily since February. The sessions are held at a community space near Moda Parkı and cost nothing to attend.

What Residents Are Being Told to Do

The practical picture is complicated. Turkish law, under KVKK Article 11, gives individuals the right to request deletion of their personal data, and a facial image qualifies. But enforcement against foreign platforms operating outside Turkish jurisdiction remains slow and often ineffective. Several residents who spoke to The Daily Istanbul described submitting formal requests and waiting months for any response.

The Veri Hakları Derneği advises affected individuals to file complaints simultaneously with the KVKK board and directly with the platform hosting the image, using standardised templates the group publishes on its website. It also recommends documenting every instance of the copied image with a timestamped screenshot before requesting removal, because images frequently disappear from one location and reappear on another within weeks.

For many Istanbullus, the frustration is less about any single photograph and more about a creeping sense that public life in a heavily photographed city now carries an invisible cost. The woman whose image appeared in the Başakşehir property advertisement has submitted two formal KVKK complaints. As of this week, the advertisement is still live.