'My face is being used to sell things I've never heard of': São Paulo residents speak out on stolen images

A woman who runs a small clothing stall in the Feira da Liberdade market on Rua Galvão Bueno discovered last March that photographs taken from her public Instagram profile were being used to advertise a counterfeit cosmetics operation based, she believes, out of a warehouse somewhere in Brás. She is not alone. Across São Paulo, residents from Pinheiros to Heliópolis are confronting an expanding problem: their personal and professional images duplicated, stripped of context, and deployed by strangers to sell products, spread misinformation, or impersonate them entirely.

The issue has sharpened this year as Brazil's federal consumer protection agency, Senacon, began fielding a documented surge in complaints tied to unauthorised image use on platforms including Shopee, Mercado Livre, and Instagram. The timing matters: Brazil's Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, the LGPD, turned six years old in August 2024, yet enforcement against small-scale image theft remains thin, particularly for vendors and informal workers who lack the legal resources to pursue takedown claims individually.

The cost lands heaviest on informal workers

In Heliópolis, the large favela community in the Ipiranga zone, a community health promoter described to neighbours at a local residents' association meeting in June how a photo of her taken during a public vaccination drive in 2025 had been repurposed to promote an unlicensed pharmaceutical product circulating on WhatsApp groups. The reputational damage was immediate: people in her own neighbourhood began questioning whether she had endorsed the product. She contacted the platform's reporting tool and waited 23 days for a response. The post stayed up for 19 of those days.

The pattern repeats in wealthier districts too, but with different stakes. A fitness instructor operating out of a studio near Avenida Faria Lima said his transformation photos — before-and-after images he posted to attract clients — were being used by at least three separate supplement vendors on Mercado Livre by early 2026. Each seller had localised the listings to appear São Paulo-based. The instructor filed a formal complaint with the Procon-SP, the state consumer protection body headquartered on Rua Barra Funda, in February. As of this week, the case remains open.

Procon-SP logged more than 4,200 complaints related to digital identity and image misuse in 2025, according to figures the body publishes on its official transparency portal. That represents a rise of roughly 38 percent compared with 2023. Takedown requests to major platforms, when successful, take an average of between 10 and 30 days to process, a window that community advocates say is far too long when the copied image is tied to someone's livelihood or safety.

What residents can do right now

Digital rights organisation InternetLab, based in the Vila Madalena area and specialising in Brazilian internet policy, has published guidance for individuals whose images are being used without consent. The steps start with screenshotting and archiving every instance before filing any report — platforms sometimes remove content from a complainant's view before a formal record is established. Filing simultaneously with Procon-SP and directly through each platform's intellectual property or privacy reporting tool improves response times, according to the organisation's published recommendations.

For those in lower-income communities who cannot navigate Portuguese-language legal forms easily, the Defensoria Pública do Estado de São Paulo offers free digital rights consultations at several Núcleos Especializados locations, including the office on Avenida Prestes Maia in the city centre. Appointments can be scheduled online through the Defensoria's portal.

Senacon has indicated it intends to publish updated platform accountability guidelines before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Whether those guidelines include faster mandatory takedown windows — the demand most consistently raised by community members interviewed for this article — will determine whether the next round of complaints looks much like this one.