'My face was being used to sell things I never agreed to': Dubai residents speak out on duplicate image theft

Raneem, a 34-year-old Lebanese graphic designer working out of a co-working space in Jumeirah Lakes Towers, noticed something wrong in March. A client forwarded her a sponsored post running on an Arabic-language e-commerce platform. The product being advertised was a weight-loss supplement. The face in the photograph was hers — lifted, she believes, from her professional LinkedIn profile. She had never heard of the company. She had never consented to anything.

Her experience is not isolated. Across Dubai, a growing number of residents — freelancers, small-business owners, hospitality workers — are reporting that their personal or professional photographs are being replicated and redistributed without permission, used in advertising, fake reviews, or AI-generated content farms. The issue has moved fast enough that the Dubai Electronic Security Center and the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority have both issued separate public guidance on image-based identity misuse in the past twelve months, though enforcement actions specifically targeting duplicate image use remain difficult to count publicly.

A Problem With Roots in Dubai's Digital Commerce Boom

The context matters. Dubai's push to become a regional digital economy hub — anchored by the Expo 2020 legacy district now operating as District 2071 in Al Wasl, and by successive rounds of regulatory liberalisation for e-commerce licenses through the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism — has brought enormous volumes of online commercial activity. That activity has also created a market for cheap, credible-looking advertising imagery. Scraped photographs of real people, particularly those who present professionally online, have become a resource for low-budget operators running campaigns across Instagram, TikTok, and local classified platforms.

A Pakistani delivery coordinator based in Al Quoz, who asked not to be named because his employment visa is tied to a sponsor, said he found a version of his photograph — cropped from a group shot taken at a colleague's apartment — used as a profile image on a fake customer review account for a restaurant in Bur Dubai. He reported it to the platform. Three weeks later, the account was still live.

The UAE's Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021 on Combating Rumours and Cybercrimes explicitly covers the unauthorised use of personal photographs. Penalties under the law can reach fines of Dh500,000 for certain categories of image misuse. But community members who spoke with The Daily Dubai described the practical distance between the law on paper and a resolution they could actually reach as significant. Filing a complaint requires visiting a police e-crime unit — the Dubai Police Cybercrime Reporting Centre on Al Amardi Street accepts walk-in cases — and many residents, especially those on employer-sponsored visas, said they were reluctant to engage with official processes for fear of complications to their residency status.

What Residents Are Actually Doing

Some are taking platform-level routes first. Google's image search and Meta's photo recognition tools allow users to locate unauthorised uses of their images without involving authorities. A Filipino nurse living in Dubai Silicon Oasis said she used a reverse image search in January and found her photograph, taken from a private Facebook post, being used on at least four separate fake-nurse recruitment pages targeting jobseekers in Southeast Asia. She filed takedown requests directly with Meta and reported the pages to the Abu Dhabi-headquartered Emirates Digital Authority, which coordinates cross-platform content reporting.

Legal advocates in the city say the most protective step residents can take right now is auditing their own digital footprint. Setting professional profile images to restricted visibility, watermarking photographs used in commercial portfolios, and registering formal complaints promptly — rather than waiting to see whether a platform self-corrects — all improve the chance of a documented record if a case escalates.

For Raneem, the resolution was partial. The sponsored post came down after she sent a formal legal notice through a lawyer operating out of Business Bay. The company behind it, she said, was registered in a jurisdiction outside the UAE. She never received an apology, and she does not know whether the original image file was deleted. She changed her LinkedIn photograph anyway. She said it felt like the only thing fully within her control.