'My photos are everywhere and I never agreed to that': Zurich residents speak out on duplicate image spread

A woman living in a Langstrasse apartment block discovered her photograph — taken at a neighbourhood housing protest in 2024 — had been copied and republished on at least four separate websites, none of which she had any connection to. She had not been asked. She had not been told. She found out by accident, running a reverse image search on a whim. She is not alone.

Across Zurich, a growing number of residents are coming to terms with what digital rights advocates describe as the duplicate image problem: the automated or semi-automated copying and redistribution of photographs featuring identifiable people, stripped of their original context and dropped into entirely new ones. The issue has taken on particular urgency in 2026, as generative tools make image replication faster and cheaper than at any previous point, and as the Swiss Federal Data Protection Act — revised and in force since September 2023 — gives individuals stronger formal grounds to demand removal.

Neighbourhoods where the problem surfaces most

Community organisers in Kreis 4 and Kreis 5, two of the city's densest and most photographed districts, say they began hearing complaints in earnest over the past eighteen months. The Quartierverein Aussersihl, which covers much of the area around Helvetiaplatz, confirmed it has fielded multiple inquiries from members unsure of their legal options when images appear on unfamiliar platforms. A paralegal clinic run in partnership with the Zurich Bar Association at Stauffacherstrasse 45 has seen an uptick in walk-ins raising image-rights questions, according to its publicly posted session logs for the first half of 2026.

The problem is not confined to protest images or street photography. Residents who contributed photographs to participatory urban planning consultations — including the ongoing Freilager-Areal redevelopment process in Albisrieden — have found their submissions surfacing in commercial contexts. One such consultation, run through the city's online Mitwirkung platform in early 2025, involved hundreds of submitted images. The city's planning department has not yet issued public guidance on how submitted photos are stored or whether third parties can access them.

ETH Zurich's Media Technology Centre, based on the Hönggerberg campus, has been studying the mechanics of image duplication across platforms since 2022. Its researchers have documented cases where a single photograph uploaded to one Swiss civic platform appeared in modified form on more than a dozen downstream sites within 72 hours. The centre's published work does not identify individuals, but the scale it describes matches what community members in Zurich are reporting anecdotally.

What residents say they want

The requests are remarkably consistent. People want to be notified when their image is reused. They want a straightforward removal process that does not require hiring a lawyer. And they want clarity from the platforms — both commercial and municipal — about who holds the rights to images once uploaded.

Under the revised Swiss Data Protection Act (revDSG), a photograph of an identifiable person qualifies as personal data. That means any organisation processing such images must be able to demonstrate a legal basis for doing so. The Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner's office in Bern logged a 31 percent rise in complaints related to online image use between 2023 and 2025, according to its most recent annual report published in April 2026.

Practical options exist right now. Residents who find their images republished without consent can file a formal request for deletion directly with the hosting platform, citing the revDSG. If the platform is based outside Switzerland, the GDPR provides parallel grounds for EU-hosted sites. The FDPIC in Bern offers a free written advisory service; appointments can be requested through its official website. Closer to home, the Zurich consumer advice centre at Mühlegasse 16 in the Altstadt has added image-rights consultations to its walk-in calendar every Tuesday afternoon from 14:00 to 17:00, starting 7 July 2026.

The broader question of how city-run platforms handle submitted photographs is likely to land before the Zurich Stadtrat before the end of the year, after a motion filed by members of the Gemeinderat in June called for a formal audit. Until that audit reports, residents are advised to treat any civic image submission as potentially public — and to keep records of what they upload and when.