Facebook’s facial recognition photo-tagging feature no longer exists, so there is nothing to enable. Meta shut the system down on November 2, 2021, and deleted more than a billion people’s face templates along with it. What Meta brought back afterward is narrower and works differently: a video selfie to recover a locked account, and automatic scanning of ads for public figures’ faces to catch celebrity-endorsement scams. Neither is a setting you turn on, and neither tags you in friends’ photos the way the old feature did.
What actually happened to Facebook’s facial recognition
Facebook launched automatic facial recognition for photo tagging in the early 2010s, and by 2021 more than 600 million accounts, about a third of daily active users at the time, had it switched on. It compared faces in newly uploaded photos against a template built from photos you were already tagged in, then suggested a tag or, for some users, narrated who was in a photo through the Automatic Alt Text feature for blind and low-vision users.
Meta ended it. In its own November 2021 announcement, the company said it deleted “more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates” and gave its reasoning in its own words: it was weighing “the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.” If you go looking for the toggle this article originally described, on the current Facebook app or Settings menu, it is gone, because the system behind it no longer runs.
Is any facial recognition still active on Facebook in 2026
Yes, but only in two narrow, specific situations, both confirmed on Meta’s own current policy page, and neither is the always-on photo tagging this article used to describe.
Getting back into a locked account. If your account is compromised and you’re locked out, Meta can ask for a video selfie and compare it against your existing profile photos to confirm you’re the real owner. Meta’s policy page states it plainly. The comparison happens once, then “we delete them as soon as we finish comparing… regardless of whether the comparison finds a match or not,” and nothing is stored afterward.
Catching celebrity-scam ads. Meta also compares faces appearing in ads against roughly 50,000 public figures who’ve enrolled in the program, to flag ads that impersonate a celebrity to sell a fake product. Meta reported celebrity-bait scam reports fell 22% globally in the first half of 2025 after expanding this. Regular users’ faces aren’t part of this comparison unless they are one of the enrolled public figures.
Both uses are consent-gated and per-instance, matching a specific photo or video against a specific account at a specific moment, not a system that runs continuously across everything you or your friends upload.
Does Instagram have a separate facial recognition setting
No. The same Meta policy page states the comparison draws on “photos on your Facebook or Instagram profiles, including any previous profile photos on Facebook,” so Instagram photos feed the identical account-recovery and scam-detection system rather than running a separate, independently switchable Instagram feature. There’s no Instagram-only auto-tagging tool to turn on either.
What to check instead, since there’s no setting to enable
If you came here because you saw a face-related prompt from Facebook and want to know if it’s legitimate, it’s almost certainly one of the two situations above, an account-recovery selfie check or an ad-scanning flag. It is not a new version of the old tagging feature. If you’re trying to reduce how your face appears on Facebook generally, the useful controls are Settings, then Tagging, and Settings, then Face Recognition, which currently confirms the feature is off because there’s nothing left to switch on for most accounts.
Frequently asked questions
Can I turn Facebook facial recognition back on? No. The photo-tagging system this article originally covered was shut down entirely in November 2021 and Meta deleted the underlying face data. There’s no setting that restores it.
Why did I get a video selfie request from Facebook? That’s Meta’s account-recovery check, used when your account may have been accessed without permission, not the old tagging feature.
Does Facebook still recognize me in other people’s photos? No. Automatic tagging based on face matching across the whole photo library ended with the 2021 shutdown.
Akshay Mhatre is a Tech Journalist who likes to keep up with the latest from the tech world. He has worked at many popular news portals like BGR and TechRadar before joining TheLeaker as a News writer and journalist. A writer by day and a VFX artist by night. In his free time, he also likes to make motion graphics and concept art. You can find him on Instagram @akshayrazr_95 and contact him on akshaymhatre[@]theleaker.com.