ive already compared it . Its the exact same as if im not even trying to be private :(
Based on the Invidious documentation the popular tab should be the same for everyone so the thing that would prove the tracking is somehow following you despite your privacy efforts would be finding a completely separate device where the popular tab is not the same.
To be clear are we talking about the popular tab on invidious or youtube?
If it’s invidious then the pool of users on your instance could be small enough that one person watching a bunch of videos could skew the popular tab results. The invidious documentation mentions that the feed is “generated from the videos that are popular amongst the users registered on your instance” so personal watch history probably has nothing to do with it and every user sees the same page.
If it’s youtube then the invidious instance you’re using could be just forwarding your traffic to youtube which would defeat the entire purpose of invidious but nothing would stop someone from setting up an instance that does that.
The easiest way to confirm would be to compare the popular tab with someone else’s device that’s never logged into your accounts or been on your networks…
Because again, if your IP and browser fingerprint stuff have been successfully changed websites have little to no means of tracking you reliably unless you tell them who you are. The sites that check your fingerprint have access to all the data sites like invidious or youtube have so if the fingerprint sites show different results on your different setups your tracking data cannot be aggregated. For this to not be true your setups would need to be completely compromised in some targeted way and or guesses would need to be made based on targeted behaviours/data, and if either of those were the case the holes in security would likely be used for more important things than syncing video recommendations.
If you are using a public Invidious instance it’s effectively still someone else’s computer so it could still be tracking you in some ways but if you’re using many of the things you’ve tried they should only be able to track things like your current IP and browser fingerprints which should not have any links to your other IP + fingerprint setups, google, or any other sites.
So what I think is probably going on here is a misunderstanding of how the “popular” tab works in invidious. It probably depends on which instance you’re using but the “popular” tab on your instance is probably showing what videos are “popular” on that specific instance. So the videos you see there would be based on what videos all users on that instance watch which would typically be biased towards tech and privacy adjacent videos. I’m not sure if your local watch history factors into that at all but if it does it would not follow you once you’ve change IP + browser fingerprints and if you go to a different instances you’re likely to see different “popular” videos.
I’m not sure how to word this differently other then again saying that the Invidious popular tab should be the same for all your devices, all my devices, and everyone’s devices since the base Invidious is open source, claims to not track its users, and the popular page is built from what everyone on that instance watches.
The entire point of Invidious is to completely remove the direct google connections when users watch videos so assuming your instance is not some kind of google honeypot… for almost all intents and purposes google cannot track you when you use Invidious especially if you’re on a secure browser behind a vpn and if they could they would not reveal their hand to you in such an obvious mundane way. Most websites are made for people not actively trying to avoid tracking so just hitting the private browsing or incognito buttons is almost always enough to make that kind of obvious tracking go away even if the underlying server or a chrome browser phoning home is still 100% confident of your identity.