I believe Librewolf and Mullvad Browser change your timezone, either to UTC or to Atlantic/Reyjavik (for some reason; probably a bug on my end). Tor Browser likely does the same, but I'm not sure.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
16 points (94.4% liked)
Privacy
39103 readers
378 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
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Browsers (except for Tor) doing this in the name of privacy is so dumb. Our timezones are already apparent due to our IP addresses. Not only does this not hide the timezone but also makes the user more fingerprintable. Now I'm the dumbass from Ohio who's browser reports UTC timezone for some reason.
Not so dumb for a bunch of us using VPNs with exit nodes in other time zones.
The user not having a choice is dumb either way. VPN users are the minority.
ManyThanks!
Set your system time to UTC.
could you please provide a link to an article or video about how a website could have access to information on local machine?
Your web browser gives up that information when asked by a site.
is it possible to
- disable permission for a software running on local machine from attaining local timezone and other information? (like firewall or something similar)
- disable permission for a website from attaining local timezone information passed to the browser inside browser using browser extension?
There may be browser extensions that will spoof your TZ data.
Set your system time to UTC.
but then the time display on my system would be incorrect wouldn't it
Firefox has a fingerprint resistance serting that sets the clock to UTC. It messes up a lot of sites. There's 10 million people in my timezone so I just leave it.
It'll also be wrong in every application you run in your browser. Even local sites.
Yeah I tried this as well and royally fucked myself. Not worth it.
Yes.