Is it a good idea to change my system timezone to UTC+0 for additional privacy?

2026-03-09 07:02 UTC

I use a VPN and/or Tor to do the majority of my websurfing/streaming/torrenting. Some can (notably web browsers*) 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 the chromium browsers do not have that option (at least no options i could find after a fairly extensive search), and I don’t even know if all of the other programs I have are reading them or not, such as, for example, my matrix client. So, 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.

Replies (8)

@NateNate60@lemmy.world 2026-03-09 07:45

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful. It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

Open ##595483
@GreenShimada@lemmy.world 2026-03-09 08:06

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.

Open ##595709
@RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 2026-03-09 11:19

I don’t changed my timezone but sometimes I will set local time to a country south of me. Same time but appears as a different location.

Open ##597919
@DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 2026-03-09 11:35

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

Open ##598201
@MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2026-03-09 12:01

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: ch40mestatus.qjz9zk/feature/5085102657503232 – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android #enable-clipboardchange-event Disabled

Open ##598477
@monovergent@lemmy.ml 2026-03-09 14:04

I use UTC+0 because I don’t like the ideas of timezones and DST.

Open ##600067
@0x0@lemmy.zip 2026-03-09 14:12

Keep your net-using apps in a container/vm with UTC? Or, like you said, set your system to UTC and change your clock app to calculate the correct time but you may encounter weird issues. A lot of stuff relies on accurate time.

Open ##600124
@Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-03-09 18:52

I’m reasonably sure there’s an option in librewolf that will hide your timezone and just report it as +0, independent from what you actually use is the os. It has a lot of fingerprint hardening either enabled by default or available as an option.

Open ##603463