'My Family Photo Was Replaced by a Stranger's': Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Errors in Singapore's Digital Records

The error appeared without warning. A Tampines resident logging into her HDB MyFlat portal in late May found a photograph of an unfamiliar middle-aged man displayed in the section meant to show her unit's registered occupants. Her own profile image had vanished entirely. She spent three weeks and four separate visits to the HDB Branch Service Centre on Tampines Central before the file was corrected.

Her case is not isolated. Across Singapore, a cluster of residents, students, and workers have flagged a similar problem: duplicate or misassigned images appearing in government-linked digital platforms, replacing their own photographs with those belonging to strangers. The issue has surfaced across systems managed by different agencies, suggesting the problem cuts across more than one back-end database.

The timing matters. Singapore is in the middle of a broad push to consolidate digital identity infrastructure under the National Digital Identity framework, anchored by Singpass. The government's Smart Nation and Digital Government Office has been migrating legacy records into updated platforms since late 2024. Data hygiene problems — including duplicate image files — were flagged as a known migration risk in a public consultation document published by GovTech in March 2025. That consultation closed in April 2025, but residents say they are only now seeing the downstream effects.

From Buona Vista to Bedok: Who Is Being Affected

A postgraduate student at the National University of Singapore's Kent Ridge campus noticed in June that her SkillsFuture Credit account was displaying a photograph of another woman, someone she did not recognise, alongside her NRIC details. SkillsFuture Singapore, the statutory board under the Ministry of Education that administers the credit scheme, confirmed it was investigating image-matching errors following a system update rolled out in the first quarter of 2026. The board said affected users should contact its helpline at 6785-5785 to flag discrepancies and request manual verification.

A Bedok North flat owner reported a different variant: his MyInfo profile showed the correct photograph, but a property document downloaded through the Integrated Land Information Service, known as INLIS and managed by the Singapore Land Authority, attached a different person's image to the ownership record. The Singapore Land Authority said on 30 June that it was aware of a limited number of cases linked to a batch processing error and had begun individual remediation.

Residents around the Queenstown and Buona Vista areas have posted on the HardwareZone forums and on community Telegram groups citing similar experiences, with several noting that the error only became visible after they accessed their records through third-party applications that pull data via Myinfo's API. The Myinfo API, which allows private-sector apps to retrieve verified government data, may have served as an unintended amplifier for the underlying duplication fault.

What Residents Should Do Now

GovTech recommends that anyone who suspects their profile image has been duplicated or replaced log into their Singpass account, navigate to the Profile section, and use the Report an Error function introduced in the January 2026 platform update. Users who cannot resolve the issue digitally can visit a Singpass Face Verification Centre — there are counters at Tampines Regional Library, the Lifelong Learning Institute on Paya Lebar Road, and the Central Public Library at Victoria Street.

The Personal Data Protection Commission, which has jurisdiction over data accuracy obligations under the Personal Data Protection Act, confirmed on 2 July it had received a small number of complaints related to image misassignment and was engaging the relevant public agencies. Under the PDPA, organisations are required to correct personal data that is inaccurate upon a verified request from the individual concerned.

For residents caught in bureaucratic limbo, the practical advice from the agencies is consistent: document every discrepancy with screenshots, note the date and time of discovery, and request a written acknowledgement from whichever agency you contact. That paper trail could matter significantly if the image error has already been served to a third party through the Myinfo API — which, unlike a static portal, may have already transmitted the incorrect data to a bank, employer, or insurer before anyone noticed it was wrong.