A watch is a second screen, not an extension of the first.
Every setting covered in our guide to lock screen previews assumes the phone is the only screen in the room. A paired smartwatch quietly breaks that assumption, since it mirrors phone notifications onto its own display by default, often with the same sender name and message preview a carefully configured phone has been told to hide. The watch was never part of that original setting, so it keeps showing what the phone has since learned to conceal.
This matters most in exactly the settings where a phone's own lock screen behaves well: a dinner table, a meeting room, a train seat, anywhere a wrist is more visible at a glance than a phone kept in a pocket.
Checking what your watch actually mirrors.
On an Apple Watch, the companion app on the phone lists every app that mirrors notifications, with a per-app toggle for whether the message preview shows in full, a redacted version, or nothing beyond the app's icon. On Wear OS watches, the equivalent sits under the watch's own notification settings or the paired phone's app, again broken down by individual app rather than one blanket switch.
The default on both platforms tends toward showing more rather than less, mirroring the phone's own notification style closely, which is worth checking directly rather than assuming a phone level privacy setting has already been applied to the watch as well.
Redacted previews, the useful middle setting.
Both platforms offer something between showing everything and showing nothing: a notification that names the app but not the sender or the content, enough to know something has arrived without printing who it is from on a screen glanced at across a table. This is usually the best default for a messaging app specifically, and worth setting deliberately rather than leaving on whichever option the watch shipped with.
Turning off mirroring entirely for one specific app, rather than adjusting how much detail it shows, is the stronger option if a particular conversation should never reach the wrist at all. It is worth setting this deliberately for the one or two apps that actually matter rather than accepting whichever default the watch arrived with, since most people never open this menu after the first day of ownership.
The wrist raise, and who else sees it.
A watch typically wakes and lights up its screen the moment the wrist is raised, which is convenient for checking the time and equally convenient for anyone sitting across a table at the exact moment a notification happens to land. Lowering the watch's brightness or shortening how long the screen stays lit after a raise reduces this without turning off notifications altogether, a smaller adjustment than disabling mirroring but worth combining with it.
Some watches also offer a theatre or do not disturb mode that stops the screen waking on wrist raise entirely, useful to switch on deliberately for a dinner or a meeting rather than relying on the watch's own judgement about when quiet is appropriate. A watch left face down on the table achieves something similar without needing a menu at all, a small habit worth as much as any setting on this page.
Watch faces and complications.
Beyond notifications that arrive and fade, a watch face itself can carry a running complication, a small live tile showing the next calendar entry, an unread message count, or a fitness ring, visible at a glance every time the wrist is raised rather than only when something new arrives. A calendar complication printing the next appointment's title directly on the watch face is easy to overlook as a privacy setting at all, since it never triggers a notification and simply sits there, updating quietly.
Reviewing which complications a watch face actually shows, and swapping a detailed one for a plainer date or battery display, closes this without touching the notification settings covered above at all. It is a smaller adjustment than the others in this guide and worth exactly the minute it takes.
Reviewing this after any watch change.
Notification settings on a watch have a habit of resetting, partially or fully, after a software update, a factory reset, or simply pairing a new watch to replace an older one. It is worth running through the same check again in each of those moments rather than assuming settings carried across automatically, since a redacted preview quietly reverting to full detail is easy to miss until it happens at an inconvenient moment.
Why this matters for a booking.
Picture a dinner date confirmed while your watch rests face up beside the plate in Oud-Zuid: the same wrist that would never show a stranger your phone can happily print the sender's name for the whole table, purely because nobody thought to check the watch's own settings. That holds whether the companion confirmed is filed under auburn and red or slim, and whatever figure the rates page eventually quotes, since the watch simply mirrors whatever arrives rather than judging its content. The booking page covers what that original message needs to say.