Android 5.0 Lollipop‘s notifications features let users see a preview of their new emails, text messages, social media alerts and more on the lockscreen. It can be a handy way to help you see whether a notification is important or not without actually unlocking your phone. However, it also means that anyone that picks up your phone can see snippets of information that might be private. Samsung offers three options for lock screen notifications thanks to its TouchWiz UI overlay. The first is “Show all content,” the second is “Do not show notifications,” and the third is the “Hide sensitive information” option, which is the default option used when you first get Lollipop on your Samsung smartphone. If you want to stop notifications from showing up on the lock screen completely, simply go to Settings, Sounds and Notifications, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and then click ‘While locked’. You’ll now find the aforementioned options. Select “Do not show notifications” to turn them off completely.
The “Show all content” option means you’ll get notifications on the lock screen and Samsung won’t attempt to hide any information it thinks might count as ‘sensitive’.
The “Hide sensitive content” option means some notifications will show up with a “Content hidden” message, as shown below. You’ll find that the content of messages will be hidden, and with some apps the name and image of the sender is hidden too. You can tweak your settings to hide additional content that the Hide sensitive content option might not deem sensitive enough. You’ll need to go to the app you no longer want to see previews of in the lock screen, navigate to the app’s settings and then uncheck ‘Preview message.’
The Hide sensitive content option is available on other smartphones running Android Lollipop, such as the Google Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, but you’ll need to turn on a pin, pattern or password for your lock screen in order for the option to show up in the Sound & notification settings. You might also like: How to fix Android Lollipop battery problems Ashleigh is Tech Advisor’s Head of Affiliate. Providing expert buying advice you can trust is her forte, helping you to find the most reputable consumer tech products and services, and ensuring you don’t spend a penny more than you should.
