Their Photos Were Stolen Online. Tasmanians Want Answers About the Platforms Profiting From It.

At least a dozen Tasmanians have come forward in recent weeks to describe finding copies of their personal photographs circulating on third-party websites and social media platforms where they never uploaded them, images scraped from public profiles, business listings, and in some cases private community pages. The complaints are landing at a moment when federal proposals to tighten image-based abuse laws are still working their way through Canberra, leaving affected residents with few immediate tools.

The issue has particular weight right now because the Commonwealth's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2023 left gaps around image scraping that advocates say Parliament has not yet closed. Tasmania's own Consumer, Building and Occupational Services office, which handles some complaints under state law, has told affected residents it has limited jurisdiction over platforms incorporated outside Australia.

Voices From the Community

People describing the experience don't use the language of policy. They use words like violation and helplessness. Several residents in the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay described discovering profile pictures and family photographs reposted on aggregator sites they had never heard of. One North Hobart small-business owner said she found her headshot, taken for her storefront listing on Elizabeth Street, appearing on at least three unrelated commercial websites overseas. She said she spent more than six weeks filing takedown requests before one was honoured.

In Launceston, members of a community Facebook group centred around the Inveresk precinct reported that photos posted in the group, intended for a local audience, had been scraped and used in unrelated online advertisements. The group administrator said she tightened privacy settings in May after members began reporting the duplications, but she noted the damage had already been done for images posted before the change.

The Tasmanian Women's Legal Service, based in Hobart, has fielded calls from women who discovered intimate or semi-intimate photographs redistributed without their consent, a category that overlaps with but is distinct from the broader scraping problem. The service has directed callers toward the eSafety Commissioner's complaints process, which under current rules requires complainants to have already contacted the platform directly and received no satisfactory response within 48 hours before eSafety will formally intervene.

What the Data Shows, and What's Missing

The eSafety Commissioner's annual report for the 2024-25 financial year recorded more than 16,000 image-based abuse reports nationally, up from around 10,000 in 2022-23, a figure that does not capture the broader category of non-consensual image duplication that falls short of the legal definition of abuse. Tasmania's proportional share of complaints has historically been small, but advocates say that reflects under-reporting rather than under-occurrence.

Meaningful state-level data is hard to come by. Tasmania does not publish a standalone breakdown of image-related online complaints, and requests to the Department of Justice for figures on complaints logged since January 2026 had not been answered by publication time.

The federal government's proposed Online Safety Amendment Bill, flagged earlier this year, would extend rapid takedown obligations to a broader class of image content, but as of July 2026 it has not passed the Senate. That delay is precisely what frustrates people who have been through the complaints process. Filing a report, waiting 48 hours for a platform that may not respond, then filing with eSafety, then waiting again, the cycle can stretch across months while images remain live.

For Tasmanians dealing with the problem now, practitioners at the Tasmanian Women's Legal Service and community legal centres such as Community Legal Centres Tasmania recommend documenting every instance with a screenshot and timestamp before requesting removal, since platforms sometimes delete evidence along with the content. Filing simultaneously with the eSafety Commissioner and the Australian Communications and Media Authority is also advised, even if jurisdiction is uncertain, because a paper trail matters if the matter eventually reaches civil proceedings. The Community Legal Centres Tasmania network, which operates across Hobart, Launceston, Burnie and Devonport, can provide initial free advice on options under the state's Criminal Code Act 1924 for the most serious cases. Federal legislation may eventually sharpen those tools, but for now, the people affected are largely navigating this alone.