iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise
arstechnica.com
“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.
  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    3•8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network.

    Enter CreepyDOL, a low-cost, distributed network of Wi-Fi sensors that stalks people as they move about neighborhoods or even entire cities.

    In 2020, Apple released iOS 14 with a feature that, by default, hid Wi-Fi MACs when devices connected to a network.

    Over time, Apple has enhanced the feature, for instance, by allowing users to assign a new private Wi-Fi address for a given SSID.

    In fairness to Apple, the feature wasn’t useless, because it did prevent passive sniffing by devices such as the above-referended CreepyDOL.

    But the failure to remove the real MAC from the port 5353/UDP still meant that anyone connected to a network could pull the unique identifier with no trouble.

    The original article contains 680 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!