Are animal and pothole alerts triggered because someone else marked them? I don't know how else they could be triggered. So this may be a side effect of being connected to your phone.

I had to turn off some of the communications on my 830. Imagine getting alerts of nearby garmin users when you are on a ride with 6000 other people. I got multi-page alerts of people's names. There have been rare occasions when I passed by someone who knew my name and I didn't recognize, but I'll live with the embarrassment of not knowing who they were.