I have read that these apps might not be phoning home nearly as often if they were *allowed to do so*. Once they are blocked, they freak out because they can't talk to the mothership and the frequency of connection attempts goes up.
I have no idea if this is true, and I don't care. The less data these companies have on me, the better.
@Dobo
Well, I know how to use iptables to forward requests from one IP to somewhere specific, but the next part I'm not sure about. Making a canned response that is what the app expects is outside my skill set. Or do you think *any* response would work?
@voltronic
Should be possible to map the URL to your own rpi and give the app a placeholder response, no?*
It would be interesting to see what happened to the frequency of requests.
* talking though my hat here: I'd need to see what the traffic looked like to know whether it's actually possible.