Holy hell. Thats pretty serious if you ask me. Has anyone brought this up before?

It seems to be for getting the announcements on new releases. Why do you need the hash of the home directory for that?

The GUI gave me the impression that I had to press "Check for updates" before it would "dial home", apparently I was wrong. Why would you do that every 30 minutes? It shouldn't do that automatically!

I didn't see the comment where they admit its logged. But if it is why in the hell would they do that? that puts them at unnecessary legal risk of receiving subpoenas for this information.

Update:
The Armory developers are releasing an update that will fix everything we were worried about, see here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731315.msg8299712#msg8299712