'My Face Was Replaced and Nobody Told Me': Berlin Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

The complaint kept surfacing at Kotti community meetings this spring. Residents of the Kottbusser Tor area in Neukölln opened neighbourhood apps, housing authority portals, or local event listings and found something wrong: their profile photographs had been replaced with someone else's image, or duplicated across multiple unrelated accounts. For some, it was a minor annoyance. For others — particularly members of Berlin's large Turkish-German community who use these platforms to navigate housing applications and social services — the error carried real bureaucratic weight.

The issue, broadly termed duplicate image replacement, occurs when database or content management systems fail to assign unique identifiers to uploaded photographs, causing one image to overwrite or populate multiple user profiles simultaneously. It is a technical failure with human consequences, and Berlin residents say the city's accelerating push toward digitised public services has made the problem more visible and more urgent in 2026.

Where the Problem Is Being Felt

The Stadtentwicklungsgesellschaft Berlin mbH, the city's public housing development company, runs a tenant-facing digital portal through which residents in blocks across Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Lichtenberg manage maintenance requests and tenancy documents. Several tenants who contacted The Daily Berlin described logging into the portal in recent months to find their profile image had been replaced by a photograph of a stranger. One Lichtenberg resident said she had uploaded her own photograph in February 2026 during a mandatory digital account verification process, only to discover by April that the image attached to her profile belonged to a different tenant entirely. She raised the issue with her housing coordinator at the Frankfurter Allee office. The coordinator confirmed the swap was a known system error but could not say how many accounts were affected.

Similar reports emerged from users of the BVG Jelbi mobility platform, which aggregates bike share, scooter, and public transit options under one app. Jelbi, operated by Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, requires a profile photograph for certain registered user tiers. After a platform update rolled out in March 2026, a cluster of users in Friedrichshain reported their images appearing on other accounts in the system. BVG has not published a formal statement on the scope of the error, and the company declined to provide comment to this newspaper by publication time.

The Rathauspassagen shopping and community centre in Mitte, which hosts a digital community board managed by the Bezirksamt Mitte, also saw complaints filed in late May 2026. The board, used by local organisations to post event notices with organiser headshots, temporarily displayed mismatched images across at least a dozen listings, according to two organisers who use the platform regularly.

Why 2026 Is Different

Berlin's Senate Department for Digital Transformation rolled out its revised eGovernment strategy in January 2026, accelerating migration of roughly 140 citizen-facing services onto unified cloud infrastructure by the end of the year. That consolidation, while intended to reduce fragmentation across the city's 12 Bezirke, has introduced compatibility problems between legacy databases and new storage systems — including how image files are tagged, stored, and retrieved. Data protection lawyers in the city note that duplicate image assignment, where one person's biometric-linked photograph appears on another person's account, may trigger notification obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation, specifically Article 34, which requires informing affected individuals of breaches that pose high risk to their rights.

The Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, the Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, received a statistically notable spike in image-related data complaints in the first quarter of 2026, though the office has not published a breakdown by platform type. Citizens can file complaints directly via the office's portal at datenschutz-berlin.de, and affected residents should document the error with a screenshot and timestamp before reporting.

Practically speaking, anyone who uploaded a profile photograph to a Berlin public-sector portal or mobility app since January 2026 and has not checked their account recently should do so now. If the displayed image is not their own, the relevant data protection authority recommends filing both an internal complaint with the platform operator and a parallel report with the Berliner Beauftragte. The Senate's digital transformation office told this newspaper only that it was reviewing compatibility protocols, without providing a timeline for resolution.