You’re still ignoring what I’m saying. I can’t continue this conversation. It’s just going in circles. I’m telling you the travel router will use its own WAN MAC address to send the packets that come from your connected device. There is no way for the travel router’s LAN MAC addresses to get onto the internet. The issue ONLY arises when you use Wi-Fi on the client device which then makes your device’s MAC address publicly visible to other Wi-Fi networks which can then expose you.
Sorry! Thanks for your comment. I honestly forgot that a router will have separate WAN and LAN MAC addresses. My networking knowledge is obviously pretty rusty. Okay, I think that answers all my questions. Thanks again!
No problem.
A home router will typically have 3 MACs: the LAN MAC, the WAN MAC, and the wireless MAC. The wireless MAC is also the BSSID. The BSSID is what is used to find someone’s location.
It should not be possible for someone to find your router’s LAN MAC, or WAN MAC for that matter, without actually being connected to the router. Your router only broadcasts its BSSID and ESSID; nothing else. The BSSID is pretty much always seen though, if you are within signal range.
So then it would be safe to have my router connected to the Airbnb router via the Airbnb router’s Wifi network? I.e. not wired into it. IIUC, my router’s wireless MAC would be visible to other devices then (since it’s connecting to the Airbnb router over Wifi), but that wouldn’t really affect me at all, because my laptop is wired into my router, so my laptop only sees my router’s LAN MAC, and there’s no way for anyone to match my router’s LAN MAC to its wireless MAC. Did I get that right?
Correct. In that case, the only thing the local ISP (or the internet) sees is the wireless MAC (BSSID) of the router’s interface, but it will not see your laptop’s MAC address or any MAC address on the LAN side of the travel router for that matter. And the only thing your laptop sees is the travel router’s LAN MAC address, not the BSSID.
The laptop (or any device) being able to see the BSSID is what allows you to be geolocated. As soon as you enable Wi-Fi on the laptop, it’s going to do a Wi-Fi scan, noting the BSSIDs of the Wi-Fi APs (wireless routers) in range, and sending that list of BSSIDs to a web service that looks up the known geo-coordinates of those APs, and report back what your geo-coordinates must be, based on what APs you’re closest to. Your device needs to be connected to the internet in order for this web service to act, however keep in mind your device may also cache a copy of the database of nearby Wireless APs while you’re offline to “remember” where you were last located.
So again, if keep Wi-Fi (and cellular!) turned off and you maintain only a wired connection between your laptop and the the travel router, then the BSSID of the of the travel router and any other routers is not given to your device.
That all makes sense. Thanks a lot for the discussion! I really appreciate it