Home Assistant does communicate with some outside servers to pull data. It is very dependent on what components you are running.
If you use Chinese switches for example and they don’t offer local control, Home Assistant needs to communicate with the server the switch communicates with to get the state.
I don’t use any Chinese switch, I freshly installed hass and I ran tcptrack. I’m concerned about the data privacy, I’m not sure what data is transmitted or if it’s just pulling or also sending.
I have a dev instance of Hassio that doesn’t have anything loaded right now. I ran packet capture on my router and restarted it to see what its communicating with. Everything looks normal. Nothing for the IP your referenced.
What components do you have loaded?
Two outside calls were made:
alphyn.canonical.com.ntp
151.101.192.223 (Pypi)
Im going to run another now that startup is done and see what else is transmitted.
Edit: Do you have a port open on your router? If so, this is likely a port scanner, its going to happen constantly.
Second had one packet which was just internal broadcast traffic NetBIOS Name Service
Im guessing this is a component you have loaded or an external scanner. You should be able to understand the difference in your logs.
When I first started in HA I recorded all of my traffic to/from HA for awhile (days) and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Haven’t done it recently but It appears nothing has changed.
You have a port open which means its accessible to anyone on the internet.
There are various types of scans that happen that look for open ports and the services running on them. This is ‘normal’ traffic and is incoming, there is no way to stop it. If you close the port, the scan will still happen, except your router drops the traffic so you likely don’t see it.
The data privacy and security comes in when you secure your HA instance. A strong password and maybe two factor authentication.
There are ways to restrict the incoming traffic on an open port but they are very router specific and generally aren’t available on consumer level gear.