this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
34 points (97.2% liked)

Privacy

46985 readers
569 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] voxel@feddit.uk 5 points 14 hours ago

Fingerprinting is a very difficult topic. A lot on how their algorithms and tech actually works is obfuscated and hidden from the people's eye. I will be totally honest with you, I don't think changing ur timezone will gian you much benefit, it might even make you stick out more since it doesn't correlate with other information like your IP address, preferred language, etc.

There has been a browser extension that set ur browser values to match the IP address region, but it's now history sadly.

Overall, I think if cchanging your timezone will benefit or harm you, comes down to very specific adversaries.