Jakarta Officials Demand Action Against Thousands of Fake Images in Digital Archives

Indonesia's digital infrastructure has a clutter problem. Across government ministries, municipal databases, and the country's sprawling e-commerce ecosystem, duplicate and manipulated image files have quietly accumulated for years, corrupting public records, inflating storage costs, and, in the worst cases, undermining the integrity of official documentation. Now, with the Nusantara capital transition demanding unprecedented levels of digital migration, the issue has become impossible to ignore.

Technology officers at Balai Kota, Jakarta's city hall on Jalan Medan Merdeka Selatan, have been working since early 2026 to audit the municipal content management system ahead of a planned data handover to new administrative bodies tied to the Nusantara transition. What they found, according to publicly circulated internal memos reviewed by The Daily Jakarta, was extensive: entire folders of duplicate photograph files associated with infrastructure permits, flood-monitoring records, and social assistance registries. Some image entries appeared under multiple file names with no clear originating version.

Why This Moment Is Different

The timing matters. Indonesia's national data governance framework, formalized under Government Regulation No. 71 of 2019, requires public agencies to maintain verifiable, non-duplicated digital records. Compliance deadlines tied to Nusantara migration have effectively forced a reckoning that bureaucratic inertia had previously delayed. The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, rebranded as Kementerian Komunikasi dan Digital, or Komdigi, following the Prabowo cabinet restructuring in late 2024, has flagged image asset integrity as a priority area in its 2026 digital transformation roadmap.

Independent researchers at the Institut Teknologi Bandung's School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics have been studying the downstream effects of duplicate image propagation in large-scale Indonesian databases since at least 2023. Their published findings point to a compounding problem: when duplicate images are ingested into machine-learning systems, used increasingly by both government agencies and private platforms, they skew training datasets and reduce model accuracy. For Jakarta's flood early-warning systems, which rely partly on satellite and ground-level imagery, that is not a trivial concern.

Tokopedia, the e-commerce giant that merged with Gojek to form GoTo Group and maintains one of the largest product-image repositories in Southeast Asia, has publicly acknowledged running automated deduplication pipelines across its seller catalog. The scale is significant: the platform hosts tens of millions of active product listings, and image duplication, whether from copy-paste seller behavior or upload errors, has been an operational challenge the company has addressed through its internal AI tooling. No specific figures on duplicate removal rates have been publicly disclosed by the company.

What the Experts Are Recommending

Practitioners in Jakarta's growing civic-tech community are pushing for a standardized hashing protocol, essentially a digital fingerprinting method, to be adopted across all agencies feeding data into the Nusantara migration pipeline. Organizations including the open-data advocacy group Perkumpulan Satu Data Indonesia have argued in published position papers that without such a standard, the new capital's foundational data layer risks inheriting Jakarta's legacy mess.

The concern is especially acute at Dinas Kependudukan dan Pencatatan Sipil, Jakarta's civil registry office on Jalan S. Parman in Slipi, West Jakarta, where digitized identity photographs form the backbone of the national population database, or DUKCAPIL. Registry officials have not publicly commented on the scope of any duplication issues within that system.

For businesses and institutions trying to get ahead of this now, technology consultants operating out of coworking hubs along Sudirman Central Business District are advising clients to run open-source tools such as ExifTool and perceptual hashing libraries before any large-scale cloud migration, and to document the process for eventual regulatory audits. The window before Nusantara transition deadlines tighten further is narrow. Agencies that have not started an image-asset audit by the third quarter of 2026 will likely find themselves under pressure from Komdigi compliance reviews before the year is out.