Private Wi-Fi Addresses

In this video, we’re going to look at private Wi-Fi addressing on the iPhone. With private Wi-Fi addresses, the iPhone creates a unique identifier every time you switched networks. This helps prevent profiling of you when you switch from one network to another. Let’s take a look at private Wi-Fi addressing on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

As I mentioned in the introduction, what private Wi-Fi addressing does is it prevents networks from tracking you. How does it do this? Well, your iPhone has its own unique identifier. This is called a MAC address. This has nothing to do with Apple Macintosh. MAC address stands for media access control. And every device on the internet has its own MAC address, unique MAC address.

To see what your MAC address is, what you do is go over to your network settings. So I’m going to swipe over to the left. And now I go over to Settings. From here, I need to go to my network here. So I go over to noteboom here, and then I tap on the ‘i’ to get information about this network.

When I tap on this, we have our Wi-Fi address. This is the MAC address. Now, typically the way that MAC addresses work is they are assigned to the device, and they do not change. So this says how a network can profile you. It’s like your own little serial number. You go from one network to another; they’re going to be able to follow you around, these networks, these advertisers, and then they can build a profile for you.

To prevent this, what you want to do is you want to change this MAC address whenever you switch networks. Well, that’s what Private Address does. When this is turned on, and it is on by default, this MAC address will change when you switch networks. This will help prevent networks and advertisers from profiling you because now you’re going to have a different MAC address when you go to a new location. It’s going to be like a different iPhone. So that’s what Private Address is. It changes that MAC address every time you switch networks.

Now you’re going to see here that I can turn this off. Why would I want to turn this off? Some networks are not compatible with Private Address, so what you may need to do, as you may need to turn this off. Now, if you do turn it off, what’s going to happen is this number here, this MAC address will not change, and then networks will be able to profile, or advertisers will be able to profile you. So once you switch networks again, after you’ve turned it off, what you’ll want to do is go back and turn this on. Whenever you go to a new network, your MAC address here is going to change, thereby preventing networks or advertisers from profiling you.

So that’s what Private Addresses are on the iPhone and how the iPhone prevents networks or advertisers from profiling you. It does this by switching your MAC address whenever you switch networks. This is going to be on by default. It’s compatible with most networks, but in some cases, it is not compatible. If it is not compatible, you’ll get an alert, and then you can go and turn Private Address off. You just go to your network, tap on the ‘i’, and then from there, you can turn it off. Once you turn it off, you want to make sure that you turn it back on when you get to a new network.

So that’s how Private Addresses work on the iPhone.