Will MAC Address leaking pose a privacy risk for IoT?

In-brief: Privacy researchers warn that unique MAC addresses emitted by smartphones and IoT devices act as persistent identifiers that can be harvested (via wardriving, Wi‑Fi logging, SSID collection and services like WiGLE) to map users’ movements and build detailed profiles; the article describes demonstrations ("From the Dark", airoViz), past data-collection examples (Google Street View, Wireshark analyses), and urges regulatory attention to mitigate growing privacy risks from ubiquitous connected devices.