Router MAC Address and Privacy

Installing and Using OpenWrt
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Router MAC Address and Privacy

Recently, I am considering purchasing a portable OpenWRT router to better protect the traffic of all my devices while traveling. However, I have some privacy concerns:

I am worried that when connecting to different hotel networks, the unique MAC address of my router obtained by the ISP could lead to my identity being uniquely identified and tracked. Currently, iOS has the feature to randomize MAC addresses for different networks and rotate them after a period of time. I would like to know if the OpenWRT router has the capability to "randomize" and "rotate" the MAC address that the ISP obtains.

Additionally, I have seen claims that routers broadcast their MAC addresses, which may pose some privacy issues. Could you explain how this works? Can the aforementioned "rotating MAC addresses" and "randomly generating MAC addresses for each network" help avoid this issue?

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If you think MACs are an issue, you can set Openwrt up to randomize them on every boot, all of them.

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What do you mean by "broadcast" exactly? Any device connected to a network needs a MAC address, and any other device connected to the same network has to know that MAC address.

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