It's easy to block devices from calling home. The trust issue is harder. I think the real fix is to move to a different company until they change their minds.
Ubiquiti does seem like a generally good company, just seems like someone decided more feedback on failures was a good idea and added the remote debugging... without thought on opt-in. After all I get a few similar reports a day (x failed... report home?), but they are of course opt-in.
I think OP's point is if Ubiquiti decided to roll this up through their networking stack, they could theoretically silently still send the updates through to their collectors, no matter how many blocks you put in place (assuming you use Ubnt switches/routers/firewalls/APs).
This would be easy to discover if you mixed brands, but the point is how would you trust them anymore?
The entire product line is specifically designed to give you insight into what packets are going where, and the ability to control which ones you let through.
You can argue that this should have been opt-in but it’s absurd to say that anyone cannot trivially opt-out.
I don’t understand the point of speculating that they are going to break iptables to get crash reporting, other than spreading FUD.
Microsoft broke local search completely on latest Windows 10 updates if you've ever tried to block Cortana. They count this as a non-issue because from their point of view you're not supposed to block Cortana/web search.
I've hated this "just block it" mentality around Windows 10 from day one because it was obvious to me it would be a losing game for the user in the long term.
You can't fight the software developer forever on this and with each update they send. Eventually if they really want that tracking feature they're going to integrate it into some other core feature that will stop working if you try to disable the tracking.
That in and by itself is hair-raising! It's absolutely, obviously, crassly obvious that Ui only concern was getting the telemetry out and everything else (like failure modes) was an afterthought. It paints a picture the crowd here are probably very familiar with: Upper mgmt needs this feature a month ago, go implement it asap. No PM, no architect, no nothing, just C-level straight to a dev...
Software is complex and bugs happen everywhere, the firmware wasn't even released yet (it was an opt-in beta) when the bug occurred. I don't like this any more than the next guy but beta is BETA for a reason, to find bugs.
What to do when they add this to their other products, such as routers?