Why is iOS 14.x automatically turning WiFi Private Address setting back on? Will I need to keep going back into Settings every one or two hours to manually turn it back off?

Hello and thank you for responding.

I did not toggle WiFi off and restart iPhone. But I did discover a couple things that did work through trial and error during a series of iPhone restarts with WiFi toggle on the entire time. And before I get into that, we have two iPhone 8 Pluses in the house and two 2017 iPads. Both iPhone 8 Pluses experience the exact same problems during troubleshooting described below. And neither iPad 2017 experienced connectivity issues at any time. Finally, both iPhones and both iPads remained on iOS 13.7 until early November, the 1st for her iPhone and the 2nd for mine. So, I believe what that means is both our iPhones went from iOS 13.7 directly to iOS 14.1. Then, when iOS 14.2 came out on 11/5, I installed that on both iPhones. But regardless, both 14.1 and 14.2 gave me the exact same WiFi connectivity issues.

I have two WiFi routers in the house, one primary WiFi with integrated cable modem and one secondary WiFi which is hard-wired to the primary and has a wireless satellite based on the other side of the house. So, all my troubleshooting began with the primary WiFi, unplugging the secondary WiFi, restarting the primary, then restarting the secondary WiFi. Switching between the primary and secondary WiFi systems resulted in two outcomes: either the iPhone screen icon indicated WiFi was connected and Settings in WiFi indicated connected but none of the apps requiring Internet connection on the iPhone would work because of no connection; or everything would work normally for a short periods of time such as anywhere from two minutes to maybe 20 minutes tops before things stopped connecting again.

The first real solution I found after repeatedly switching back and forth between my home WiFi routers and doing multiple iPhone restarts, all ending in one of the two outcomes above, I connected to a nearby xfinity wifi hotspot in the neighborhood. After doing that the iPhones both stayed connected. The only issue was the bandwidth and download speed of the free xfinity wifi hotspot was less than desirable in many cases and untenable in several cases. So, I went back to doing more extensive research online by trying searches based on more detailed and specific phrases and discovered a thread where a guy had narrowed the problem down to the "Private Address" setting in WiFi settings.

After toggling that setting off, both iPhones worked well on either of our WiFi systems for up to about two hours when both iPhones somehow automatically toggled "Private Address" setting back on which broke connection to WiFi again. So, I togged the "Private Address" setting back off manually, restarted both iPhones, both restarted with the "Private Address" setting turned off. So, on 11/6 both iPhones were connected to each of our WiFi systems, the "Private Address" setting was toggled off, both iPhones were restarted, and both came back online connected to the WiFi system it was shut down connected to with the "Private Address" setting toggled off. And since then, we have been able to switch back and forth between our two WiFi systems without any connectivity problems.

Both my WiFi routers are configured to only allow MAC ID's that I enter manually using admin consoles. And I realize it is possible to go back and reconfigure my WiFi routers to allow whatever randomly generated private address the iOS 14.x is generating. But frankly, I prefer to keep using the MAC ID at the machine level.