yes but there are numerous locations in the code where information (and some of which strategy related) is shipped back to their servers. To their credit they openly disclosed such fact when being asked about. A reference to this fact should still be in old chats on their google code page. Obviously as this is open source code such "leaks" can be easily eliminated.
yeah... think you can disable w/out touching source, but any way you slice it... flexibility is tasty.