In general, our computing devices are passive. They perform tasks for us when we click buttons or enter some text, but otherwise they just wait for our commands. With the rise of mobile devices, “push” notifications became a way for our devices to alert us when certain things happen. We can get notified when we get text messages, phone calls, or emails, and we can have our favorite apps display notifications of the latest news, stock prices, and sports scores.
But it’s very easy for these notifications to overwhelm us. If you allow notifications on your iPhone from every app you use, you may spend more time checking your notifications than getting things done. While some notifications can be very important – phone calls and text messages, for example – too many notifications is bad for our sanity.
One problem is that you can get notification overload: you get so many notifications that it’s hard to keep up, and you eventually ignore them because you’re just too busy. Another issue is that if your notifications display sensitive information on your device when it is locked, anyone can see them. And finally, website notifications, the browser on your Mac, can be a security risk, as they can be hijacked to try to scam you.
In this article, I’m going to explain how you can control notifications on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. I’ll show you how to do this so you only get the most important notifications, and I’ll also explain the settings to apply to keep your notifications secure.
Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.