iPhone users who don't want to be tracked need Apple's iOS 17.1 privacy patch

Apple's "private Wi-Fi address" feature that has been built into iPhones since 2020 has not worked as intended until now. Remember the release of iOS 14, all the way back in 2020? Apple introduced a  new feature called "private Wi-Fi address" that promised to replace the fixed MAC address. (Think of the MAC address as physical address, but rather than being used to find your home, it's used to find your device on networks and the internet.) Beginning with iOS 14, this private Wi-Fi address was, by default, a randomly generated one for every Wi-Fi network to which a device was connected. The feature promised iPhone users protection from tracking, which in turn offered greater anonymity. Also: Apple just released iOS 17.1, MacOS 14.1, and WatchOS 10.1 - here's what's new The feature was broken and useless right from the start. Last week Apple pushed out iOS 17.1 for the iPhone, a long-awaited update that patches a raft of bugs and headaches. One of the bugs patched related to how "a device may be passively tracked by its Wi-Fi MAC address." The bug was discovered and reported to Apple by security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, and Mysk released a video showing how to extract the real MAC address of a device using a tool called Wireshark, and how this security feature was broken right from the start. Speaking to Ars Technica, Mysk said that "[f]rom the get-go, this feature was useless because of this bug. We couldn't stop the devices from sending these discovery req...