If you expect privacy or anonymity, Meshtastic is a danger to that, and you should not use it.

If you expect privacy or anonymity, Meshtastic is a danger to that, and you should not use it.

This is your regular reminder that Meshtastic is designed badly and is effectively a straight up non-anonymized wireless tracking beacon which can be intercepted and tracked by anyone with a smidgen of technical knowhow.

Resetting your devices identity or reloading the Meshtastic firmware does not help, because Meshtastic encodes the hardware MAC address of your device's radio unencrypted into every packet sent, including on-by-default telemetry packets which are sent regularly without any user interaction.

Many of these packets are intercepted and recorded by a myriad of MQTT observers around the world that other Meshtasic users have set up to log mesh traffic to the internet.