I cannot recommend setting up a pi-hole or something similar more before getting started on anything else.
My friend set up a whole bunch of really nice smart features in his apartment, and separately set up a pi-hole as he was beginning to build out his NAS/plex server to be remotely accessible. One of the many things he found out was that his lightbulbs were pinging back and forth 100s of times an hour with a server in China that his pi-hole was able to start filtering/blocking. I don't know if he ever set up any packet sniffing to see what exactly was being communicated with all those pings, but you can never be too safe with this stuff.
I cannot recommend setting up a pi-hole or something similar more before getting started on anything else.
My friend set up a whole bunch of really nice smart features in his apartment, and separately set up a pi-hole as he was beginning to build out his NAS/plex server to be remotely accessible. One of the many things he found out was that his lightbulbs were pinging back and forth 100s of times an hour with a server in China that his pi-hole was able to start filtering/blocking. I don't know if he ever set up any packet sniffing to see what exactly was being communicated with all those pings, but you can never be too safe with this stuff.