Australian telecommunications giant Optus has apologised for publishing a man's former driver's licence, including his date of birth and photo, on their website without his permission.

Key points: Optus says it mistakenly used the driver's licence photo without permission

Optus says it mistakenly used the driver's licence photo without permission Mr Green originally uploaded the licence to his blog in 2011

Mr Green originally uploaded the licence to his blog in 2011 Optus has contacted Mr Green to apologise directly

David Green, originally from Adelaide and now a resident of Melbourne, said he only realised Optus had used his expired South Australian driver's licence when a friend messaged to notify him.

A photo of the licence appears on the Optus website with Mr Green's licence number, Adelaide address and signature blacked out, but his photo and date of birth visible.

He tweeted a screengrab of the licence used as an example on the site, asking: "Can I have some money please?"

Mr Green, an Optus customer and a comedy writer on the ABC's Mad As Hell television show, said his first reaction was "confusion".

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When he moved to Melbourne, he uploaded the photo to his blog — blacked out — to add colour to a post about his relocation.

He suspects that Optus googled "drivers licence" and did not check the option that denotes free-to-use photographs.

"I gave that licence up when I moved to Melbourne and I needed to get a Victorian licence instead," Mr Green said.

"I scanned it before I got rid of it and blacked it out, and I uploaded the licence in a blog post where I talked about my move to Melbourne.

"I blacked out the address and the ID number, which is the important one as I definitely don't want to put that online.

"Maybe that's why they chose mine … I've already done some photoshopping for them in blocking out the address but my face is there."

When the ABC contacted Optus, a spokesperson said the organisation had removed the image from its website and contacted Mr Green directly to apologise for the error.

"While the photo of Mr Green's licence was publicly available on his blog, Optus acknowledges that we did not seek permission to reproduce the image," the spokesperson said.

Mr Green said he has shared his birth date on his Twitter profile before, but felt that is "a bit different with the whole licence".

"I've been on TV before and I'm used to people sending messages saying 'I just saw you!'," he said.

"But when I got this message about my driver's licence being used, well that's a bit different.

An Optus spokesperson said the image had been used mistakenly without permission. ( AAP: Dave Hunt )

Mr Green said he would have been "happy for them to use it if they had privately asked", but said it would have been easy for the organisation to make their own image.

"It's probably just down to someone at the bottom rung who was in charge of loading photos on the website and who was careless," he said.

"But they could have used an example one, a dummy one — there's a lot of examples out there where it isn't a real person, when it reads 'John Citizen' or something."

Optus did not respond to the ABC's query about whether it will offer Mr Green compensation for the error.

Mr Green plans to seek advice on whether he should take the issue further.