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Itinj24

Contributor
Original poster
Nov 8, 2017
4,605
2,638
New York
Maybe someone here has a clue because I definitely don’t. After I updated my 11 Pro Max, AW S5 and S4, all these popped up as new devices in my Eero app even though they were previously connected (and connected during update). Now in the Eero app, these devices are labeled with “Unknown Manufacturer” when previously they were labeled with “Apple, Inc.” I tried erasing network settings and then reconnected and again they popped up as a new device with an “unknown manufacturer label. The MAC address is also different on my iPhone than what it shows in the Eero app. I tried rebooting the Eero network with no change. Same behavior with my wife’s iPhone and AW but not my iPad Pro. Contacted Eero and their response was this. Does this sound right?:

I did get a chance to read your email and seen you had a question about your device's manufacturer display in the eero application, after update the device software. I can help you with this!

In apple's new update they are spoofing (changing) the Mac address of the device and you may need to contact apple on when they will update the manufacturer information to the Mac addresses they are using when spoofing or I would have them help on getting devices back onto the original registered Mac address if you wanted to resolve the manufacturer display on the devices in the eero application.
 
Well I’ll be damned! Is this a new setting? It should be an opt in rather than an opt out or at least know what my home network is. Maybe a pop up asking if you want to enable it before connecting to an unknown network.
Thank you very much!!! This has been driving me up a wall for the past couple days.
 
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Yes, a new iOS 14 feature.

Great feature and I’m all for it but should be off by default, at least on the network I’m using to update lol. Just checked my iPad and the setting was and is still on (never touched it) but at the top it says, “Privacy Warning, Private WiFi address is turned off for this network.” Guess it’s smarter on iPadOS. Thanks for the info!
 
should be off by default

But then they'd have your actual MAC address and know when/where you connected to the network (and potentially share that with others to track you across different networks) if it was off by default and you had to actively go in and turn it on for each network.
 
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But then they'd have your actual MAC address and know when/where you connected to the network (and potentially share that with others to track you across different networks) if it was off by default and you had to actively go in and turn it on for each network.
Yeah I understand but would take it a step further and pop a splash asking if you want to enable for the particular network before allowing the phone to connect. Just found it funny I popped up as new device on my home network as soon as I updated iOS and WatchOS. Now I have a bunch of spoof devices in my eero app device list lol.
 
I’ve disabled it via MDM for the home SSID. It messes up our DHCP reservations.

If you open up Apple Configurator on the Mac you can make a configuration profile to disable this on a per-SSID basis.
 
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