If you block the information from your electric meter, you may suffer consequences. The power company may just shut you off. This is because they have no other way to read the meter other than to send out a technician and they are no longer staffed to send out a technician to read a meter. You’ll probably find there is a clause in your agreement that if you mess with the meter, you lose the meter. As for things like the “internet of things” there is no reason to have that at all. I played hell trying to get my HP printer, which I only bought to use as a scanner, not to connect. Eventually, I couldn’t use it anymore, so it went into the can. There is no reason for your refrigerator to talk to the internet. As for the car, if they pass legislation to track your mileage you can bet that if you disconnect the device that the first time you pass a reader and it doesn’t get a read, you will be targeted and pulled over because it will be tax evasion.
Incidentally, I worked for Regency Communications when they designed the first remote read power meter. I can attest that the only thing on the engineer’s mind was cutting down the manpower required by the power company to operate. Reading the meter can be dangerous as you have to get into fenced yards with dogs. Discussing this with my power company the woman told me that the amount of cheating by the self-read meters went to zero. Before it was commonplace. That meant honest people were paying the bills of dishonest people.
My parents have had a HP multi function color laser printer for some time. I used HP Smart to scan their documents to the computer. Then out of the blue, HP wanted an account sign on to use the feature. I just used scan to USB. That was rather annoying.
“The logged data can be used to collect or control time of use or rate of use data that can be used for water or energy usage profiling, time of use billing”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
They can profile you, and charge you more at certain times to control your behavior.