My iMac keeps turning WiFi on by itself

Story continued from above message...

Since deleting the "Wi-Fi" option from above, tonight (early morning) my menu bar keeps indicating that my Wi-Fi is on. I turn it off from the menu bar and it turns on again. It turns on again after varying times, eg. 4s, 20s, 28s, etc. I do not see any Wi-Fi accounts listed but I would like this message to stop.

Okay, now I have found a commonalty. The moment I stopped playing a Poker Stars tournament the "nonsense" in my menu bar stopped. I don't know if this is coincidence. I'll get back to you on that tomorrow.

I have this same problem. Admin account on iMac OSX 10.9.5

You can't trust anyone any more, and I have about as much faith in apple as I had in Mircoshite when I made the switch many years ago.

If an admin user clicks on WIFI OFF in the menu bar, it should **** well STAY OFF!! and it always used to until recently. WTH is going on?

Here's a thought. Does anyone with this issue happen to have Location Services enabled? Since Macs do not have a GPS radio in them how do they know here they are located? The answer is they use WiFi to triangulate with other WiFi signals in the area. Go to System Preferences -> Security&Privacy -> Privacy -> Location Services and make sure they are disabled. Could be that Location Services is turning WiFi on when it needs to look something up. It's worth a look.

Hi Ikrupp

I have watched this thread hoping for some suggestions as I have this problem and it's driving me nuts. Oddly I only noticed it starting around 4 months ago. It never did it before and I changed nothing major on my system. I have checked and my Location Services was ticked (on) but underneath it lists which apps can use it, and nothing ticked in there so it shouldn't be trying to ping like you suggest. But i turned it off anyway so will watch closely and see if WiFi comes back on, I have a feeling it will but hoping not! thanks

I have been monitoring my WiFi connection closely and stuck a note on my screen to record what I did and when. My wifi was definitely turned OFF manually. After ten days (almost exactly to the minute as it happens) it turned itself back on. This is something my iMac has never ever done before. So any ideas what it has started doing it now? I don't like things turning themselves on by themselves, and for those who say "just leave it on" my answer to that is "no". Apple wouldn't give me the option of turning something off if the machine was "designed to run" with it on. I can have a browser open all day, or closed all day. I can have Skype open all day, or closed all day. Etcetera. I can (for many years) have Wifi on or off, depending on what I am doing and how I wish to use my computer, me being the admin user and purchaser, if that still counts for anything. So does anyone know what could be causing this, if it's an OS thing or any other suggestions for taking back control of my WiFi connection?

I know, this is an epically old thread but then again this problem is still bugging me

(I'm stuck with ElCapitan on my Mac mini, so I can't tell if it's been fixed with Sierra)

+ I'm running PokerStars too - so you may be on to something there.

Did you manage to find a solution, though?

No sorry I have no solution, and nobody seems to care as per usual in my experience of the last few years.

You said you can't tell if the problem has been "fixed with Sierra". That makes the assumption this is a "problem" and not a "planned behaviour" of the computer by Apple. I am wondering if it's the latter and nobody has come along to say otherwise which further suggests this to be the case for me.

My WiFi continues to turn itself on whenever it feels like it. Incredibly annoying, worrying, and just another disappointment in a list of them recently. My next computer won't be a Mac I am sad to say.

I'm still having that strong hunch of PokerStars causing this

BUT

after reading lkrupp's comment I took a look at my Pref -> Privacy -> Location Services

and the only app that had recently used my location when the problem/behavior occurred

was the Weather widget which happens to sit in the NotificationCenter and does of course

update itself regularly. Then again, shouldn't it update in a scheduled manner and/or when

the NotificationCenter is actually opened by the user?

From what I've read here and experienced myself, this problem/behavior doesn't follow

a schedule but occurs almost randomly and even several times within a few minutes.

Why would the weather widget do that?

And/or if my hunch is correct, that the PokerStars app is actually doing this,

how come that it doesn't even show up in the Location Services pref pane?

All of this is quite strange but I'll try and deactivate location services now and see if this keeps happening.

It makes a ton of sense that this problem is related to Location Services, after all.

I hear you, but it doesn't make a ton of sense to me at all. In my mind, if a user forcibly shuts down his machine's WiFi connection (as I have done for years) that should take precedence over anything else trying to use it, and if needed an error should come up saying "xxxx can't connect due to WiFi being switched off" as happens with various other apps.

WiFi should not have the "off" option if it doesn't work 100% completely 100% of the time, as it always did.

Maybe Apple is just making spyware now and using the information they sell to try and stave off the slow collapse of the share price after the big boom caused by the iphone releases etc. Just speculating, but without any comment from Apple, that's all I can do unfortunately

I had the same and couldn't find the cause. Then stopping Pokerstars stopped the involuntary turning on.

This just started to happen to me today.

Completely arbitrary. I'm hard-lined in through my display and wifi just keeps starting up.

I'm running 10.11.6 on a 2016 MPB.

This means you are running some software that is trying to turn Wifi on - possibly, as noted above, for trying to use location services.