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I don't own one of them, but I would surely be able to instruct my router to put it in jail like I can every other device.

LAN-only.

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Fine until you're elsewhere.

Eh?

When I'm elsewhere it can continue to not have the passwords to anyone else's wifi.

Wouldn't you still need to be careful about the device auto-joining to open public wifi? Basically, if you were going to be away from your house you'd have to always remember to disable the wifi before you left. Alternatively, just keeping wifi off and only using the USB cable means you don't have to worry about forgetting to disable wifi before you leave home. :)

Most devices don't auto connect to open wifi unless you tell them to. I'd assume this would have an option for that as well.

This requires being militant about never connecting under any conditions. If the device ever is even briefly connected to a particular network (especially any commonly-named public network), unless that entry is cleared, the device may reconnect later unintentionally and with no obvious indication of having done so..

For those with more expansive threat models, intentional dvice or network spoofing or cloning might bebrisks.

Since firewalling is performd off-device (on the home-LAN router), this will resut in an unsecured evice.

My preference would be for some on-device configured networking limits. Putting full reliance in fixed-site infrastructure migh be unpleasantly surprising.

This.

People have mentioned you can ssh into it, so it might be possible to make changes to the /etc/hosts file.

That's assuming the device doesn't use straight IP addresses for whatever it's communicating with. That's possible, but pretty unlikely.

Or update/modify the networking, WiFi, routing, gateway, firewall, or other configurations on the device itself such that it connects to and communicates over only specified networks and/or hosts.

Again my point is that relying on off-device, local-netork hardware and configs is brittle.

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