Privacy & Anonymity

MAC & Your Hardware

Every network interface has a MAC address — a fixed hardware identifier burned in at the factory and broadcast to every network you connect to. It’s the local-network equivalent of a serial number, and it’s more revealing than people expect: a network operator can see that this exact device was here yesterday and is back today, tie your sessions together across visits, and log your presence by hardware. On a café, conference, or client network you don’t control, that’s a tracking handle you’re handing out for free.

Randomizing the MAC cuts that link. Present a different, random address and you look like a new device each time, with nothing tying today’s session to last week’s.

The bar panel

MAC control lives in a panel on your Quickshell bar (installed via the macarchy plugin), so it’s visible and one click away rather than a command to remember. It gives you, per interface:

• Randomize — set a random MAC on the interface.
• Restore — put the real, permanent hardware address back.
• Set a specific MAC — a collapsed field for when you need a particular address (impersonating a known device, matching an allowlist).
• Restore All — a one-click escape hatch to return every interface to its real address.

The panel shows each interface’s current address alongside its permanent one, so you can always see whether you’re spoofed and what you’re spoofed to.

When to use it

MAC randomization is a local-network layer — it protects you from the network you’re joining, not from the servers you eventually reach (that’s Tor’s job). Reach for it whenever you’re on a network you don’t trust with a persistent record of your device:

• Public or guest Wi-Fi you’ll use more than once.
• A client’s network during an assessment, where you’d rather not leave a hardware trail.
• Any situation where “was this device here before?” is a question you don’t want the network to be able to answer.

A caveat worth knowing

On some Wi-Fi hardware — Intel’s iwlwifi chipset is the common one — changing the MAC while associated to a network doesn’t cleanly take effect until the interface reassociates. If a randomize doesn’t seem to stick, disconnect and reconnect the interface (or toggle Wi-Fi off and on) and it will come up with the new address. This is a driver limitation, not a fault in the tool, and the panel’s Restore/Randomize still do the right thing — the interface just needs to renegotiate for the change to apply.