Yes. And we are also currently hosted on the EU plan of Communiteq. You can also find more info by doing an IP lookup. For example https://tools.keycdn.com/geo?host=forum.qubes-os.org.
Discourse logs quite a bit of user behavior and it is exclusively used for usability purposes as far as I’m aware. It should stay local to the instance. These are links like what posts you read (to show you only posts you haven’t read), bookmarked topics, etc. A lot of usage statistics can be found on your user profile page, which you can also hide from the public (although this does not prevent an experienced “attacker” from mining that data – see explanation)
If you think these are too invasive, your best choice is Using the Forum Via Email.
We have telemetry disabled so it doesn’t report back to discourse HQ.