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I use Cloudflare's Warp VPN all the time for regular browsing and yet I recently found that Patreon can tell the country I'm physically located in. It baffled me how it could do so; Patreon could tell the country on multiple browsers, across Windows and Android devices as well, all the while I opened it in incognito/private mode, even as I made sure that the public IP was not my ISP provided one. Of course any location-sharing permissions were denied outright.

While looking through browser privacy checkers, I noted time zone information is something that could be read by websites and servers. It wasn't just numerical offset either, it was basically in the Continent/City format, so any website can easily tell the physical location from it.

Honestly never heard of privacy leakage through this vector before; does anyone know how to outright disable browsers form advertising the local time zone? I see there are some addons to change it, but it seems to be a hassle to always configure it to match your VPN location, and they don't seem applicable to mobile browsers either.

PS Just occurred to me: does anyone know what Tor Browser does to remedy this issue?

Oxwivi
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  • See https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/31324 – mti2935 Nov 24 '21 at 13:01
  • @mti2935 It says the issue is not about time zones. – Oxwivi Nov 24 '21 at 13:12
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    OP, there are two things to be concerned about: 1) the timezone that the user's device is set to, which can be picked-up by `date.getTimezoneOffset()`, and 2) the current date and time, according to the user's system, which can be picked-up by `new date()`. – mti2935 Nov 24 '21 at 16:41
  • @mti2935, oh I just checked both in console; `Date()` leaks way too much info. – Oxwivi Nov 25 '21 at 07:49
  • Anyway, it seems Tor Browser doesn't have the solution to it either. Which makes sense, since it's JavaScript and they have no reason to prioritize fixing it since they disable JS by default for numerous other reasons. – Oxwivi Nov 25 '21 at 07:52

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