[snailmailman]

They specifically avoid sending traffic through tailscale servers whenever possible. That’s how the free tier stays free. Most connections are direct, P2P.

The traffic that does go through their servers is encrypted, and bandwidth limited on the free plan. Any snooping on client behavior would have to be done client side, and the clients are all open source. To some extent the coordination server might be able to deduce some metadata about connections; but definitely not snoop all plaintext traffic.

I think they do have some “service detection” which can basically port-scan your devices to make services visible in the web UI. But that is easy to disable. And premium/enterprise tiers can intentionally log traffic statistics.

[Lammy]

> To some extent the coordination server might be able to deduce some metadata about connections; but definitely not snoop all plaintext traffic.

Metadata is as good as data for deducing your behavior. Think what conclusions can be drawn about a person's behavior from a log of their network connections, from each connection's timestamp, source, destination, and port. Think about the way each additional thing-which-makes-network-requests increases the surveillance value of all the others.

Straight away, many people's NTP client tells the network what OS they use: `time.windows.com`? Probably a Windows user. `time.apple.com`? Probably Mac or iOS. `time.google.com`? You get the idea. Yeah, anyone can configure an NTP client to use any of those hosts, but the vast vast majority of people are taking the default and probably don't even know what NTP is.

Add a metadata point: somebody makes a connection to one of the well-known Wi-Fi captive portal detection hosts around 4PM on a weekday? Maybe somebody just got home from school. Captive portal detection at 6PM on a weekday? Maybe somebody just got home from work. Your machines are all doing this any time they reconnect to a saved Wi-Fi network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal#Detection

Add a metadata point: somebody makes a network connection to their OS's default weather-widget API right after the captive-portal test, and then another weather-API connection exactly $(DEFAULT_INTERVAL} minutes later? That person who got home is probably still home.

Required reading: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

[db48x]

True, but none of that metadata goes to Tailscale.

[nickburns]

This is pure misinformation. 'Most connections are direct, P2P' makes no sense to anyone versed in basic networking.

[snailmailman]

I don’t mean P2P in the same sense that BitTorrent or something is P2P. (Splitting one connection into many distributed ones) But more like how a game that does P2P multiplayer has the clients connect directly instead of through a centralized service.

[allarm]

What do you mean? P2P is commonplace, for example, in IP telephony, and obviously in many other cases.