'My photo was everywhere and I never agreed to it': São Paulo residents speak out on duplicate image theft

Ana Claudia Ferreira runs a small embroidery stall on Rua dos Pinheiros and has never hired a photographer. That didn't stop her likeness from appearing on at least four separate e-commerce listings last year, advertising products she had never touched. She found out from a customer who recognised her face on a competitor's page on Mercado Livre. The image had been scraped from a neighbourhood Facebook group, duplicated, cropped and reposted without her knowledge or permission.

Her story is not unusual. Across São Paulo — in the market corridors of Brás, the community centres of Heliópolis, the co-working spaces of Vila Madalena — residents and small-business owners are increasingly confronting the same problem: their images, or images of their storefronts and community spaces, being duplicated and circulated by third parties who face almost no friction in doing so.

A city-wide problem with a digital engine

The issue has sharpened in 2026 as generative AI tools and bulk image-scraping software have become cheap enough for mid-size marketing agencies to deploy at scale. Brazil's Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados — the LGPD, which came into force in September 2020 — gives citizens the right to request removal of personal data from digital platforms, but enforcement against image duplication specifically remains patchy. The Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados, headquartered in Brasília, logged a surge in complaints during 2025, though the agency has not yet published a final breakdown by category for that year.

In São Paulo, the Centro de Referência em Direitos Digitais, a civil-society body based in the Bela Vista neighbourhood, says demand for its free legal orientation sessions has climbed steadily since early 2025. The centre runs walk-in clinics every Tuesday and Thursday at its office near Praça da Liberdade. Staff there say the most common complaint they now handle involves images pulled from WhatsApp community groups and neighbourhood Facebook pages — hyper-local digital spaces where residents share content with an assumption of limited reach.

Heliópolis, São Paulo's largest favela with roughly 200,000 residents according to Prefeitura de São Paulo estimates, has seen its own geography weaponised. Images of the community's streets and murals — some of them commissioned by the Associação Comunidade Heliópolis e Região — have appeared on tourism websites and stock-image platforms, listed under generic tags and sometimes monetised through subscription fees the community never sees. The association has been pursuing takedown requests since at least February 2026, a slow and manual process that requires filing separately with each platform.

What affected residents are doing about it

Practical options exist, though none are fast. The LGPD allows any Brazilian resident to submit a formal data-subject request to a platform demanding removal of personal image data; platforms operating in Brazil are legally required to respond within 15 days. Google's image search has a removal tool that accepts LGPD-based requests in Portuguese. Mercado Livre, which is headquartered in Buenos Aires but holds Brazilian operating registration, maintains a dedicated intellectual-property complaint portal.

For people without the time or Portuguese legal literacy to navigate those systems, Instituto Defesa do Consumidor — Idec, a non-governmental organisation based on Rua Maranhão in Higienópolis — offers written guidance on its website and periodic workshops at public libraries across the city. Its most recent workshop series, run in partnership with the Biblioteca Viriato Corrêa in the Brás district, drew more than 80 attendees in a single afternoon in May 2026, organisers said at the time.

The prefeitura of Ricardo Nunes has not announced a dedicated municipal programme targeting image duplication, though the Secretaria Municipal de Inovação e Tecnologia has held internal working groups on LGPD compliance for city-owned data systems. A federal bill in the Câmara dos Deputados, known as PL 2338/2023, which concerns AI regulation broadly, remains under discussion and could add new obligations for platforms that train models on scraped Brazilian content.

For Ferreira, the resolution came via a persistent email campaign to Mercado Livre's trust-and-safety team that took six weeks and three follow-up messages. The listings eventually came down. She now watermarks every image before posting anywhere online. It is a workaround, not a solution — and it puts the burden squarely on the person least equipped to carry it.