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I’ve been changing all my devices to use MAC randomisation for the positive privacy implications.

I’ve managed to easily change my Android and iOS devices with the flick of toggle. With Android it’s called Randomised MAC and for iOS it’s called Private Wi-Fi Address.

I’ve also tried to enable this feature on my MacBook running MacOS Monteray and on my Windows 11 desktop PC.

However for MacOS there doesn’t seem to be any option to randomise / private a MAC address. My Windows 11 desktop PC is connected via a wired Ethernet connection only, however I could only find guides on how to do this for a Wi-Fi connection, I can’t find any toggle to randomise a MAC on a wired connection for Windows 11.

My question is, is it even possible to randomise / private a MAC address for a MacBook running MacOS, and a Windows 11 desktop PC that only has a wired Ethernet connection?

Nearly all the research I did only gave me guides for iOS, Android and Windows devices on Wi-Fi only.

The best article I found was this, but it doesn’t address a wired Ethernet connection for Windows 10/11 and the macOS workaround won’t persist from a reboot which isn’t ideal.

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    What on earth is the point of randomising a MAC address on a wired connection? The randomisation is to prevent unknown & therefore untrusted public wifi connections from tracking you. It makes no sense whatsoever otherwise [& should also be switched off for known-trusted connections on WiFi too].
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 18:06
  • I dont know or care how you would do mac spoofing on an Apple orWindows box, but the hardware is definately capable of tjis. Its trivial under Linux.
    – davidgo
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 19:00
  • There are several tools allowing you to do that (at least on Windows).
    – S. Brottes
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 19:10
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    @Tetsujin Thanks for informing me of that. I had no idea. I just assumed it would be beneficial on all devices wired and wireless.
    – SneakyShrike
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 18:01
  • No. MAC address doesn't traverse borders, so on a wired connection it never leaves the building. On public wifi a fixed MAC could be used to track your connection habits - do you go to Starbucks every day, or sometimes get Pret instead. In a domestic or even business network, that's just not an issue.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 18:03

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