this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 8 months ago by L4s to c/technology
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iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14::“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 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.

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