How to Disable Notification Previews on Mac
Do you want your notifications to stop showing previews on your Mac? Perhaps you want more privacy for the messages or emails you receive? Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to disable notification previews in MacOS.
Notifications are pretty useful to stay updated on your emails, text messages, calendar events, and more. Although glancing through various notifications without having to log in to your Mac sounds pretty convenient, it often comes at the cost of your privacy. This is because anyone can read these notifications even if they don’t know your password, since they appear on the lock screen. If you want to change how notifications display on the Mac Lock Screen, you can disable notification previews. This will result in the notification appearing, but it won’t show anything beyond the app icon alerting to a notification, contrasting to the default which shows a preview of the senders name and the message itself. Disabling previews of notifications and alerts is a decent privacy-conscious middle ground that allows you to avoid disabling Lock Screen notifications completely on the Mac while still retaining some privacy.
How to Disable Notification Previews on Mac
There are two important notification settings that you can use to change notification previews work on your system. Simply follow the steps below to get started.
- Head over to “System Preferences” on your Mac.
- This will open a new window on your desktop. Choose “Notifications” which is located in the top row to adjust your notification settings.
- You’ll be taken to the Do Not Disturb section. Here, you’ll be able to scroll through all the apps on your Mac and change the notification settings for them individually.
- To disable notification previews for a specific app, select the app from the left pane and uncheck the box for the option “Show notification preview”.
- Alternatively, you can turn off notification previews when your Mac is locked. Make sure you use the dropdown menu to change the notification preview setting to “when unlocked”.
There you go, now you understand how to adjust notification previews on your Mac. You can either disable them completely, only show them when unlocked, or keep the default setting.
Regardless of what setting you chose for notification previews, you don’t have to worry about anyone reading the message previews in notifications as long as your Mac is locked. This is a feature that could come in handy for all the privacy buffs out there. That being said, there’s no setting that turns off notification previews for all apps simultaneously just yet. Therefore, you’ll have to disable this feature for apps one by one for now.
If you’re not satisfied with this notification setting, you also have the option to completely disable lock screen notifications on your Mac for added privacy measures. You’ll need to log in to your Mac before you’re able to view any notifications in the Notification Center.
Do you use an iPhone or iPad alongside your Mac? If so, you might be interested in learning how you can disable lock screen notifications and previews on iOS and iPadOS devices. Just like on macOS, there’s no global setting to manage notification previews and disable lock screen notifications, so you’ll have to adjust the setting for each app individually.
We hope you don’t have any privacy concerns now that you’ve disabled notification previews on your Mac. What are your overall thoughts on how macOS manages and displays all your notifications? Do share your valuable opinions and experience in the comments section down below.
