: Difference between private address and Mac address
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A private address likely refers to a private IP Address.
All networked devices have both an IP and a MAC address.
MAC addressees are layer 2 while IP addresses are layer 3 in the OSI model.
MAC addresses are globally unique identifiers that are hard-coded in the hardware.
Every port you can plug a network cable into has its own factory set mac-address.
MAC addresses are sued to send data inside a network.
If there is a router between you and the destination the MAC address will only be used to communicate with the nearest router and the destination will never see it.
IP addresses are used to send data to places both inside your local network and beyond your local network. Routers use IPs to route traffic.
There is a subset of IP-addresses that can only be used locally and will not be routed across the wider internet. They can still be used to communicate between different local networks, but not to communicate to the world at large.
Those addresses are private and they don’t have to be globally unique at all.
Due to the number of IPv4 Addresses being limited it is common to do something called NATting and use those private IPs in your local home or business and have the router that connects your local home replace them all with a single public IP when sending out traffic to the internet.
If your home network consists of just a single network your private IP and MAC function very similarly.
If you have a bigger setup you may have your home divided into different networks that can communicate with each other with their private IPs but not their MAC addresses.
An example of a MAC address is 01:23:45:ab:cd:ef – 6 bytes usually written in hexadecimal 6 pairs of characters that can be 0-9 and a-f
An example of an IPv4 would be 142.250.186.174 – 4 bytes written in 4 decimal numbers from 0 to 255
A private IPv4 address can take the from of 192.168.x.y where x and y can be any number from 0 to 255 an 1 to 254 respectively.
There are also IPv6 addresses are 16 bytes long and written in hex like the MAC addresses usually with groups of zeros replaced by a double colon.
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