Q: I followed the instructions in your article on Turning off Facebook Calendars and Contacts in iOS 6 to disable my Facebook Calendar, however it seems that my Facebook friends’ birthdays are still appearing in my Notification Center. With over 800 Facebook friends, you can imagine how this would get pretty annoying. Any ideas how I can stop these from showing up?
– Brad
A: Firstly, keep in mind that iOS actually creates a virtual “Birthdays” calendar based on your contact information, regardless of which calendars you’re actually subscribed to.
Therefore, even if you have disabled Facebook calendar access but still have Facebook contacts activated, you will also end up with a Birthdays calendar for all of those contacts who have birthdays listed in their Facebook profiles. As with people with birthdays in your personal contacts, notifications will appear according to the Default Alert Times option, which can be found in your Mail, Contacts, Calendars section of the iOS Settings app.
If you simply want to stop receiving notifications for birthdays, you can simply set this to “None”; a Birthdays calendar will still appear, but you won’t get any Notification Center items popping up for them.
Keep in mind that this disabled ALL birthday notifications, however, including those for your personal contacts.
Note that the iOS Facebook app has its own option for providing birthday reminders—if the Notification Center entries that you are seeing have a Facebook icon beside them, they’re being generated by the Facebook app and not by the iOS Calendar and Contacts. You can access this setting in the Facebook app by opening the left-side menu, scrolling down to Account Settings and then choosing Notifications and Mobile Push.
