Randomized MAC Addresses: Why Your Phone Hides Its Real MAC

If you look up your phone Wi-Fi MAC and get no vendor found, you are probably seeing a randomized MAC address. Since iOS 14 and Android 10, phones generate a random private MAC for each Wi-Fi network to stop you being tracked across locations.

How to recognize a random MAC

Locally administered addresses have the second hex digit set to 2, 6, A or E (for example 7A:... or B6:...). These are not registered to any manufacturer, so a vendor lookup correctly returns no match.

Why manufacturers do this

Your real, hardware-burned MAC (the universal address) never changes, which made it a perfect tracking beacon in stores and public Wi-Fi. Randomization replaces it with a throwaway address per network, greatly improving privacy.

Seeing your real MAC

You can usually disable Private Wi-Fi Address for a trusted network in your phone settings to reveal the hardware MAC. Our guide to finding your MAC address covers every platform.

What this means for lookups

A not-found result is expected for randomized, locally administered or unregistered addresses — it simply means the prefix is not in the IEEE registry.