Privacy

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Is it a good idea to change my system timezone to UTC+0 for additional privacy? (mander.xyz)

submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by glint@mander.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I use a VPN and/or Tor to do the majority of my websurfing/streaming/torrenting. Some programs (notably web browsers) can read your local system time to access your timezone. And, I happen to live in... let's just say a very "narrow" timezone, my country of origin can be trivially pinpointed if you take a look at the UTC offset.

I know Firefox has a setting to spoof my timezone to UTC, but chromium browsers do not have that option (at least no option i could find after a fairly extensive search), and I don't even know whether any of the other programs I've installed are reading my timezone, such as, for example, my matrix client.

So, the solution I came up with: Do a timedatectl set-timezone UTC on the device. I can separately make my desktop clock do a little timezone conversion so no worries about time disorientation. This fixes the issue with most apps not allowing timezone spoofing too.

Honestly, now that I've typed all that^^ out, this is beginning to sound like an unnecessary schizo post that goes WAY beyond my threat model XD. Still, I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on it. Ideas to improve upon it are appreciated too.

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[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 9 points 21 hours ago

You should check your browser fingerprint first. Anything privacy-focused likely already reports your timezone as UTC. I believe that Mullvad, LibreWolf, and Brave all do that.

And it's not unnecessary at all. In fact, I've had to set my time zone to other countries where my VPN is set in order to use some sites, and set streaming device time zones to the US to not get dinged as using a VPN. This isn't unreasonable at all.