You can disable it, just like any launchd process (similar to systemd units). The default is to have it automatic, and that default is part of the OS installati

You can disable it, just like any launchd process (similar to systemd units). The default is to have it automatic, and that default is part of the OS installation (which often means OS updates reset the defaults). To actually manage something that for the general consumer (for which it is targeted), you'd mostly be using MDM profiles. Those can be created, installed and managed for free, using both Apple software and third party software. This can be done using both up-to-date mobileconfig policies or on older operating system releases using MCX profiles (similar, but different and a bit older, more like GPOs). In practise, you might have a better experience doing either of the following: - Don't use the features that depend on this, this essentially makes it moot - Don't use the OS since it is catered towards a market that wants those features and expects them to work consistently on every device (or so Apple assumes), which results in considerable engineering effort being made by Apple to make the feature(s) work instead of not-work; any modification isn't assumed to be a user configuration but rather a defect that needs to be remedied (hence the "use MDM profiles" note). As for just the networking part, Apple lists a bunch of guides for network consumption which is mainly aimed at network administrators. Any outbound firewall in your network can be configured to block the traffic as desired. If it was purely about trust, this would also be the only 'correct' way as an 'untrusted' OS isn't suddenly trusted just because you turned off a daemon. Either you trust it enough to let it roll, or don't trust it and do the policies elsewhere (off-device). But that goes for any hardware/software. Addendum: this is the first page you'll find when you ask a search engine for ports used by macOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202944 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202944 which right at the top contains a link to https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210060 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210060 which explicitly has an entry for *.smoot.apple.com. Since your image will need to be analysed to be able to do a lookup it will first have to extract features from it. If it finds something like an address or coordinate or text or anything that it can't resolve locally (i.e. because it is temporal data that couldn't be preloaded), it has to reach out to a service that is kept up to date. Those are the pages that are so easy to find, even Apple's chatbot on the support page redirects you there.