'My Face Was Everywhere — Except Where I Agreed To': Paris Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Use

Aïcha Traoré first saw her own face staring back at her from a construction hoarding on the Boulevard de la Chapelle sometime in March. The photograph — taken at a neighbourhood consultation event for the Grand Paris Express in 2023 — had been repurposed without her knowledge to promote a separate urban renewal campaign run by a local authority in the 18th arrondissement. She had signed no release form for its second use. She had not been told.

Traoré's situation is not isolated. Across Paris, a growing number of residents — many of them from working-class and immigrant communities in the northern and eastern banlieues — are reporting that photographs taken of them at civic events, community festivals, and public consultations have been recycled into unrelated advertising, promotional materials, and, increasingly, digital displays. The practice, known broadly as duplicate image replacement, sits in a legal grey zone that French data protection law has so far failed to close cleanly.

Why It Matters Now

The issue has sharpened in the post-Paris 2024 environment. The Olympics legacy activation programme — coordinated partly through the Société de Livraison des Ouvrages Olympiques, or SOLIDEO, and through local mairies — generated an enormous volume of community photography between 2022 and 2025. Images of residents at legacy events in Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, and along the Seine riverbanks were gathered by dozens of contractors and subcontractors. Who holds those files, and what permissions attach to each image, is often unclear even to the organisations that commissioned the shoots.

France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés — the CNIL — received a record number of complaints related to unauthorised image use in 2025, according to its annual report published in April 2026. The CNIL noted a particular spike in complaints linked to urban development and public participation campaigns, though it did not name specific local authorities or contractors in that section of the report.

For residents in areas undergoing rapid transformation — the Plaine Saint-Denis corridor, the Porte de Montreuil zone, the Canal de l'Ourcq waterfront — the problem carries a specific sting. Many participants in public consultations joined specifically because they were promised their input, including their image, would be used only for the project at hand. Seeing their faces on unrelated hoardings or digital screens at Grand Paris Express stations like Saint-Denis–Pleyel or Fort d'Aubervilliers is experienced as a breach of trust, not merely a technical copyright issue.

Community Voices Push Back

At the Maison de Quartier de Belleville, an association that runs civic engagement workshops in the 20th arrondissement, staff began tracking resident complaints about image reuse in late 2025. By June 2026, they had collected accounts from more than thirty individuals — most of them women, many of North African or sub-Saharan African origin — who said their photographs had appeared in contexts they never authorised. The association has since partnered with the legal aid clinic at the Université Paris Cité to offer free consultations to affected residents.

Under Article 9 of the French Civil Code and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, individuals retain the right to their own image — the so-called droit à l'image — and any commercial or promotional use requires explicit, documented consent. Reusing an image in a materially different context from the one for which it was originally captured generally voids the original consent, even if a broad release was signed. The maximum CNIL fine for a data protection breach involving image rights currently stands at €20 million or four percent of global annual turnover, whichever is higher — though in practice, penalties against small public-sector bodies have been significantly lower.

Residents and legal advocates say the practical next step is a formal audit requirement attached to any public consultation contract funded by the Île-de-France Région or the City of Paris. A motion to that effect is expected to be tabled at the Paris City Council before the end of September 2026. In the meantime, the Maison de Quartier de Belleville is advising community members to photograph any public display featuring their likeness, note the location and date, and contact the CNIL directly via its online complaints portal — a process that takes under fifteen minutes and carries no filing fee.