'They Took Our Faces': Boston Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement Online

Maricel Fontana thought she recognized herself on a city housing portal last spring. She didn't. The photo beside her name on a Jamaica Plain community board listing had been replaced with a stock image of a woman who bore a passing resemblance to her — same approximate age, similar hair — but was not her. No one had notified her. No one had asked permission. She found out when a neighbor mentioned it at a meeting on Boylston Street.

Fontana's experience is not isolated. Across Boston's neighborhoods, residents are raising alarms about a phenomenon that cuts across municipal websites, nonprofit directories, academic databases, and neighborhood association platforms: original photographs of community members being quietly replaced by generic or mismatched images, sometimes through automated content management systems, sometimes through human error, and occasionally through deliberate manipulation. The effect, those affected say, is erasure — a digital sleight of hand that strips identity from people who already fight for visibility.

A Problem That Is Landing Hardest in Specific Neighborhoods

East Boston's La Colaborativa, a social services and immigration advocacy organization headquartered on Maverick Square, began fielding complaints from clients earlier this year after several members noticed their profiles on a city-affiliated workforce development portal had been updated with placeholder images. The organization has approximately 4,000 active clients across its programs, and staff spent weeks in late March and April manually auditing member records. The problem was concentrated among accounts created before a platform migration completed in February 2026.

Across town in Dorchester, the Bowdoin-Geneva Action Committee reported similar concerns after a neighborhood newsletter's archived photo gallery — maintained on a shared hosting server — was reorganized by a third-party contractor. Faces in photographs from community events dating back to 2021 were either swapped with images pulled from public domain repositories or deleted outright. The committee has a membership of roughly 300 registered households along Geneva Avenue and Bowdoin Street.

The frustration people express is specific and personal. Residents describe scanning a webpage, finding their name attached to a stranger's face, and feeling a particular kind of dread — not quite identity theft in the legal sense, but something adjacent to it. For immigrant community members who are already cautious about how their images appear in public records, the loss of control over their own likeness carries additional weight.

Why This Is Surfacing Now

Several forces converged to make 2025 and early 2026 a pressure point. Dozens of Boston-area nonprofits, city agencies, and civic organizations migrated their content management systems as part of a broader digital modernization push tied to the city's updated Digital Equity Action Plan, which the Wu administration released in October 2024. When databases migrate, image metadata frequently breaks. Automated systems fill gaps with whatever placeholder content the new platform defaults to — often licensed stock photography.

A 2025 Berkman Klein Center report from Harvard University, based on survey data collected across six U.S. cities including Boston, found that 34 percent of respondents who had participated in civic digital platforms in the previous two years reported at least one instance where their profile information — including photographs — had been altered without their knowledge. The report specifically flagged migration events as the highest-risk moment for unintended data substitution.

Community members who have lived through this say the fix is rarely straightforward. Restoring an original image requires locating the original file, confirming consent, and navigating whatever permissions structure the new platform uses — steps that demand time and technical literacy that volunteer-run neighborhood organizations often don't have.

For residents trying to sort out what happened to their images, advocates at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, based on Federal Street in the Financial District, recommend starting by filing a written records request with the organization that controls the platform. Under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 93, residents have standing to request information about how their personal data — including photographs — is stored and processed by entities that collect it.

La Colaborativa has begun requiring written confirmation from any third-party vendor before permitting platform changes that touch member-facing content. The Bowdoin-Geneva Action Committee is pursuing a community-controlled image archive, hosted locally, as a backup. Neither solution is fast. But for people who just want their own face back, slow progress is still progress.