Every network interface (wired or wireless) on every networked device in
the world is assigned a unique 48-bit identifier���the MAC address���burned
into its ROM at manufacturing time. While it���s often (usually?)
possible to change this via the software driver, nobody thought of it
as a big deal.

Until recently, when certain, ahem, spying revelations have woken
people to the privacy implications of being able to track a machine,
particularly on wi-fi networks, based on its unique MAC address.

And so some folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force have been
doing experiments to determine whether randomly changing these addresses
would cause hiccups for any network protocols. The good news is that
the answer so far seems to be ���no���.

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/mac_address_privacy_inches_towards_standardisation/>
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