How to Disable Lock Screen Notifications on MacOS

Do you want to prevent notifications from showing up on your Mac’s lock screen? Perhaps you want to hide them for privacy reasons? If you’re a frequent user of the handy lock screen feature on the Mac, you may be interested in disabling the display of notifications on the locked screen of the computer.

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 who opens up your Mac can see them too, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t know your password since it appears on the lock screen itself.

Is this something you want to change on your Mac right away? No problem, as you can easily turn off the display of notifications on a Mac Lock Screen.

How to Disable Lock Screen Notifications on Mac (Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, etc)

You have complete control over what notifications are displayed on your Mac’s lock screen. You’ll just need to make proper use of the system preferences. Simply follow the steps below to get started.

1. Head over to “System Preferences” on your Mac from the Dock.
   
   
2. This will open a new window on your desktop. Choose “Notifications” which is located in the top row to adjust your notification settings.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. To disable lock screen notifications for a specific app, select the app from the left pane and uncheck the box for the option “Show notifications on lock screen”.
   
   

That’s pretty much all there is to it. You’ve successfully managed to disable lock screen notifications for that app on your Mac. Pretty easy, right?

From now on, you don’t have to worry about anyone reading the text messages or emails that you’ve received as long as your Mac is locked. This is a pretty useful feature for all the privacy buffs out there. That being said, there’s no setting that turns off lock screen notifications for all apps simultaneously just yet. Therefore, you’ll have to disable this feature for apps one by one for now.

In addition to this, you also have the option to disable notification previews on macOS devices for added privacy measures. For example, when you receive a text from one of your iMessage contacts, the notification wouldn’t display the message preview when it’s disabled.

Do you use an iPhone or iPad? If so, you’ll be interested to learn how you can prevent notifications from appearing on the lock screen of your iPhone or iPad. Just like on a Mac, there’s no global setting to disable these notifications and you’ll have to set it for each app individually.

Note this is for newer more modern versions of macOS, like Big Sur, Catalina, and later. If you’re on a much earlier version of Mac OS X you can follow a slightly different set of steps to hide notifications from older Mac OS X lock screens.

With notifications hidden from the Lock Screen, hopefully your privacy concerns have been resolved. 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.