Randomise your mac address to deter wifi tracking

Wander from airport to cafe? You leak a permanent identifier as you go (your mac address). And this allows you to be globally tracked.

Good news everybody, your are a couple of keystrokes from fixing this. You’ll be using network manager today. To setup randomised MAC-addresses by default to all WiFi connections, create /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/00-random.conf like so:

[device]
wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=yes

[connection]
wifi.cloned-mac-address=stable
ethernet.cloned-mac-address=stable
connection.stable-id=${CONNECTION}/${BOOT}

Afterward, reload NetworkManager:

systemctl reload NetworkManager

You can substitute stable to random if u want it to change every time rather than per connection.

You can use nmcli to allow a non-random for specific ssids (eg your home or work).