> > Sorta like - - - 'my house, my rules' except that today the are a > number of entities that > believe that they own at the very least my data but they really want > to own me - - - I > refuse that offer categorically and vehemently. > OK. So, OpenWRT and anything like an open routing solution will take care of all the "outside-coming-in" problems. But I digrees. Those are not the problems. You are concenrned with things that are now built into the terms of service of most hardware and the OS and/or apps that come with it. There is no good solution for this. IF you try to go at it from the "technical" side, i.e. to try to analyze them and to block them, you are in for a lot of (interesting) learning and you will likely not succeed. Most hardware, applications and even webpages do not work well when they are not "talking to the mothership". Yes, it sucks. (Tangent: Jaron Lanier's book "Ten Arguments..." narrates the problem, but only provides a partial solution, and it is not even technical.) If you really want to go at it from the technical point of view, put a Linux something-rather for your routing device, learn how netfilter works, look up some "deep packet inspection" (DPI) implementations on Github, and play on.