The privacy Warning message signifies that your iPhone’s MAC (Media Access Control) address is no longer hidden and is available to your network administrator. This looks like a very dire situation, but don’t worry it’s not. You can enable the feature called Private Address and immediately get rid of this warning message.
What is a Wi-Fi Privacy Warning?
Wi-Fi Privacy Warning is a network security message displayed on your connected Wi-Fi that denotes your iPhone’s MAC address is not hidden and is visible on the network. When the MAC address is not hidden, the network admin can take advantage of this to track your activities and make profiling from it. So to avoid this, Apple has introduced a new privacy feature that assigns a unique address i.e. MAC address to your device that works as a private Wi-Fi address. This MAC address is used for a particular network only and the address is changed while connecting to a different network.
How to Fix Wi-Fi Privacy Warning?
Just for the basic and instant fix, you should Toggle On and Off the Airplane Mode on your iPhone. When it’s toggled on, it will forcibly disable all the network connections. After that, you need to check if the warning message is still there. If the issue is more serious, you need to hide the MAC address of your iPhone, and the message will simply go away. Let’s see how you can do it.
Toggle On the Private Address For Wi-Fi
This is the feature Apple has added to their iOS 14 version. You may see the Privacy Warning because you have not enabled this feature yet. Or, if it’s already enabled, you simply turn it off and on again to make it functional.
Reset Network Settings
Generally, the Privacy Warning message should go away once you toggle on the Private Address. If it doesn’t, it could be due to network bugs. So, in such a case, you can Reset Network Settings. When you use this feature, all your network-related settings will be deleted. It’s completely safe. However, you are required to enter the Wi-Fi password, re-pair the Bluetooth connections, etc.
Forget This Network
This is another simple and quick fix method that can help to remove the warning sign. When you select Forget this Network, your iPhone will disconnect from that network, and you need to re-join to access the internet, which may help solve the problem.
