[Screenshot_20190502-133934_Fing] I have 4 wyze cams and this one is listed as reporting to China.

While I don’t think this is going on in this case, the issue people have with devices “reporting to China” is that many iOT devices have been compromised by Chinese companies/people in the past so that they can be used to attack other computers and servers. More info on that can be found HERE

Just noticed one of my cams had a Nova MAC when it usually doesn’t. Hard reboot got it back to its regular Wyze MAC. Is this one of the reasons hard reboot is recommended? Can this mis-ID cause connectivity problems? What is the relationship between MAC address and P2P?

Hey, folks! This is the vendor MAC address of the WiFi chip resurfacing. Usually, it should be covered by the Wyze Cam MAC after it is set up. Sounds like something went a bit funky here. Could anyone running into this please fill out this form explaining the problem and let me know what support ticket numbers you receive? We’d like to look into it. Submit a request – Wyze

As many members pointed out already, having a MAC device registered under a Chinese company is different than the device is reporting to China. A device’s MAC registration is agnostic to how it communicates to the world. Wyze cameras are manufactured in China. Most of the camera parts are purchased from China too. Nova is one of the suppliers for out manufacturer. When our camera boots up, it has an original MAC like c8028f. Wyze purchased our own MAC range which register under our company name, they start wit A4DA, 2CAA, and may be others in future. During our device boot time, our program will ‘overwrite’ the device MAC to be a uniquely assigned Wyze MAC. We have see occasional report of device showing as c8028f MAC. It is rare and not none. This is very likely to be the ‘overwrite’ failed for some reason. We are chasing the issue but it hasn’t been resolved yet. No matter what MAC the device uses your device should be functioning fine (unless you have one MAC address blocked through your network). For the question of Wyze devices talking to oversea servers, it is a totally different topic. We have explained a few times about the history and how we addressed the issue. We have a page released at https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027279571-ThroughTek-User-Privacy. Thanks!

Could you (or someone) put that in the FAQ under Security & Privacy please? (maybe a little wordsmithing)

Related thread: [image] MAC Address changed? Cameras I rebooted my waze cam V2 today and it showed up on my network under a different MAC address?? Why? Just to clarify a bit further, the app shows a different MAC then my router is showing. IP is correct on both.

Aren’t MAC addresses hardcoded into the device?

Yes - they are hard coded on the transceiver chip. The firmware that sits on top of the stack will translate it to reflect a the product company name [Wyze]. As many others have stated, just because you see a Chinese MAC address (cause they kind of make zillions of transceiver chips and soc’s) doesn’t meet your device is trying to connect to China. I’m running a sniffer and I see every device, where it tries to connect to, which port, etc. Wyze seems to like Oregon where AWS has significant edge routing/POP capabilities. Then again, I’m running a rotating VPN so I have no idea where I’m located :man_shrugging: Maybe I’m in Oregon :scream:

Have you tried refreshing the router page that’s showing the WYZE device? Sometimes it will still have the last set of up/Mac data for connected clients unless you refresh the page. It’s a quirk in the internal web server in a chip that may not auto-refresh when there’s a dataset change. If is still in conflict, re-boot the cam and then the router page.

Why is this camera reporting to China?

Cameras

peepeep May 18, 2019, 8:41pm 39

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Why is this camera reporting to China?

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