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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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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.
Heh, I wish it was +5:30
It's UTC +5:45, and my country's the only one using it. That's ~30 million people. My main fear is not being pinpointed to my personal identity, but the fact that this serves as a perfect fingerprint metric, rare enough to stick out like a sore thumb.
(felt safe enough to reveal, as i do not expect this account to be tied back to me personally)
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.