I pay Google a couple of quid a month for 'Google One'. My main use case has always been that it gives me a few hundred GB of extra Google Drive storage (which is shared between my 'family' accounts). Recently they added the Google VPN to my subscription plan, so I've started using it (never used a VPN on my phone before, mea culpa). It just runs in the background and I don't really notice it to be honest. Which I guess is kind of the point. However at home, because (I think?) it is regularly changing my phone MAC address (?) my router keeps notifying me (via the router app on my phone) that a new device has connected. Am I presuming/diagnosing this correctly do you think? I can turn off the notifications easily enough. Just keen to understand what is going on.
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MAC addresses don't change. Except in extreme circumstances where you low level refresh a firmware or some such hardware level operation.
It's almost certainly just a connection from a different ipaddress, based on what the VPN is providing for your phone.
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So is the VPN changing my IP address on the phone regularly, which is then connecting to my WiFi? So it sees it as a new device?
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I don't know, but that is likely.
Although the WiFi connection should be local through your router and not change, the router is looking at something that makes it conclude it's a different device. Without knowing what the router code is looking for to conclude that, it's hard to know.
The physical MAC address wont be changing. ... but the VPN software could be spoofing the MAC address over all connections. Which it might be doing to obscure the device for privacy reasons.
If it was documented open source software you could find out what it is doing, and how it works. But it isn't.
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Someone has snuck in and fiddled with Shady's router.
The underhand bastards.
