The code you posted doesn't send your username to bitcoinarmory.com, it sends the truncated hash of your user home directory path. This does not give us any information about you except that it will be the same when your system makes multiple requests for version/announcement information. We intentionally chose this instead of tracking by IP because we knew that IP logging was "not cool".
That's pretty much synonymous, most people will have their user name set to either their common pseudonym or their full name. If you have a batch of people who you think might have sent a transaction, 4 bytes of the hash is more than enough to work out which one.
Sending any personal information at all is "not cool", especially when nobody was told about it in the first place.
As a company, we have to have some way to measure our userbase, and we felt this was the least intrusive way possible. And you can opt-out.
Why ping every 30 minutes?
We also add the ability for you disable this by running with "--skip-annuonce-check".
You can't expect a user to apply this every single time they load up the client. Not giving the option in the GUI is intentionally obstructive.
