this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026

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

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by glint@mander.xyz to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 6 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

No, don't do that. Some browsers check if your timezone is in check and if not then they refuse to load HTTPS webpages.

[–] hyacin@lemmy.ml 4 points 16 hours ago

But if you're setting the time to UTC and your time zone to UTC, your time is still accurate. I assumed that was what OP was talking about doing, not just "leave the time as my time but change the time zone."

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Not the browsers fault, but the certificates for transport encryption (like https) don't match with a wrong system time.

Chromium, i use ungoogled Chromium, with chrome:flags

Handling of extension MIME type requests

Used when deciding how to handle a request for a CRX or User Script MIME type. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#extension-mime-request-handling

> Always prompt for install

Disable search engine collection

Prevents search engines from being added automatically. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#disable-search-engine-collection

> Enabled

Force punycode hostnames

Force punycode in hostnames instead of Unicode when displaying Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#force-punycode-hostnames

> Enabled

Popups to tabs

Makes popups open in new tabs. ungoogled-chromium flag – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#popups-to-tabs

Aktiviert

Reduced System Info

Reduces the amount of system information obatainable through headers and javascript, also causes hardwareConcurrency to respond with two cores. ungoogled-chromium flag. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#reduced-system-info

Enabled

WebAssembly lazy compilation

Enables lazy (JIT on first call) compilation of WebAssembly modules. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#enable-webassembly-lazy-compilation

Enabled

ClipboardChangeEvent

Enables the clipboardchange event API. See: https://ch40mestatus.qjz9zk/feature/5085102657503232 – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android

#enable-clipboardchange-event

Disabled

[–] ThermonuclearHoxha@hexbear.net 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

The system time is still correct if you're changing the timezone and still keeping correct time

[–] glint@mander.xyz 1 points 17 hours ago

Huh- I haven't experienced any connection problems (yet)