How to turn off birthday notifications on Google and Facebook
If you are on Facebook or on Google+ and have at least one friend or contact on the site, chance is that you receive birthday notifications.
Birthday notifications are enabled on both systems by default and depending on how many friends and contacts you have, you may get quite a view notifications throughout the year.
That's not always something that you want, especially if you get many notifications throughout the year and don't act on or have another way of keeping track of birthdays.
It is thankfully easy to disable and hide birthday information on Facebook and Google+. The following guide provides you with a walk through that you can follow to turn off birthday notifications on both sites.
Birthdays are powered by Google Calendar and taken from profile information of users that you have in your circles on Google+.
To hide the Birthday Calendar, do the following:
- Open Google Calendar. If you are not logged in your Google account you need to sign in before the information can be accessed.
- Your calendars are displayed on the left. There you find Birthdays if it is enabled.
- Move the mouse cursor over it, activate the menu icon and select "hide this calendar from the list".
To disable Google+ birthdays, do the following:
- Open the Google Calendar settings.
- Switch to Calendars at the top.
- Click Birthdays and switch from showing Google+ circles and contacts birthdays to contacts only.
If you hide the birthday calendar, you don't really need to perform the second operation. It may come in handy though if you want to block Google+ birthday information but like to receive contact birthday information.
Additional information about the process, including information on how to remove individual birthdays, are available on Google Support.
Facebook has a single preference that handles if birthday notifications are pushed to you or not. The easiest way to disable those is the following:
- Open the Facebook notification settings page. You need to sign in to access it.
- There you find Birthdays listed under "what you get notified about".
- It should be set to on which means that you get birthday notifications on the site.
- To turn them off, move the mouse cursor over birthdays and click on the edit icon.
- Use the selection menu that opens up to turn them off by selecting that option.
Closing Words
Simple repeat the processes outlined above if you want to turn on birthday notifications on either site again.
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I must admit I don’t mind the reminder.
I use that as a trigger for an annual review.
The week of their birthday I scan their contact details, LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter to make sure I have all of their public contact information up to date.
That and also send them a quick message.
Pro Tip – I also have a script that on a daily basis will choose a contact at random for review.
Ross
You da man, Martin! Do you know how many people on Reddit shot me links and it wasn’t until your article here that I ever saw a page like “Contacts only?” Google really doesn’t want you to find this info! Lol!
They didn’t hide it… if you’ve only accessed the calender through Gmail from it’s tiny reminder notice interface, then you wouldn’t know how much more you can do with it. If you click the 9 boxes icon to access Google services, you can go to the full Calendar at any time and edit, add, change stuff at whim. Changes I make to the full calender get updated to my Android’s calender and vice versa with the only difference is having a full keyboard to type when I’m on my desktop/laptop is better than Swyping or poking contact and event information into the tiny calender APP.
Every comment has a point and absolutely right, Google tries really hard to hide their settings, it was last year were I stopped using Google services altogether but two gmail and photos. There was one point in time were I was going to change every account that was using gmail address, results it would’ve been more than just a headache and stuck with it.
Thanks for the Preview Martin
I turned off FB on my android phone. When I turned it back on, all of the birthdates appeared along with holidays, etc. I do not like this feature as it does not allow me to notice the appointments that I place on my calendar. please tell me how to delete. When I go onto calendar on my android, it does not have settings, so unable to delete or change calender . I don’t want notifications to appear when the birthdays are approaching, but I don’t want them to be on the calendar 24/7. HELP
Google’s built-in calendar lets you turn off birthdays from your circles, but it does NOT let you turn off the import of Google+ birthdays into your contacts. So if you have a contact with an email address that matches a Google+ profile then their birthday is forced onto your Birthdays calendar.
Obviously this is annoying as heck, so I built a replacement Birthdays calendar without this problem:
https://better-cal.appspot.com