Anonymity Practices for Templates

Hello to all, I was working on making a non-whonix qube that routes through tor when it occurred to me that the template I was going to use probably had its timezone set to my timezone. I checked, and sure enough, it was, so I cloned the template and switched the new one to Etc/UTC.

This left me considering, “Are there other aspects of non-whonix templates that have been configured, downloaded, etc- that I need to address when using tor routing to avoid de-anonymization?”

So I thought I would make a post to ask the QubesOS community for thoughts.

Thank you for your time.
-can

Edit:
I also have set the new UTC template to update over tor.

So the short answer is “I don’t know”, but what I do know is that practical anonymity is hard if you want it done right.

I’d recommend adding your specific use-case, so anyone wanting to help can more easily understand your problem and the context surrounding it. General problems like “how do I make templates anonymous?” are hard to solve, but it’s a lot easier if you say “how do I use <this> program for <that> anonymously?” because then we can know what is a concern and what isn’t. Sometimes you want to do something a certain way, but really you want something more specific and feasible. See XY problem:

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Yes, a lot. Probably also a lot of unknown unknowns. That’s why the recommendation is just to use Whonix when you need privacy. See:
https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#what-about-privacy-in-non-whonix-qubes

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