You’re missing a private DNS. Not sure Quad9 will do the trick, but maybe you know more than me.

Get NextDNS. It comes with preestablished filters like “No Google” and “No Facebook”, but you establish your own over time as you see who is getting data from your device by viewing the log file. You can install spp on your phone. You can also get separate account for your computer. They only charge if you go over a cartain number of queries but I never have. Its the best security service I have by far.

I personally gave deleted my google account many years back. When I watch personal entertainment it’s on librewolf (on my linux computers) and grayjay (grapheneos phone). Although I do use vpn, even without vpn, from this setup there’s not really way google can track my phone videos from my desktop videos because phone videos are going through grayjay, every time I restart my computers librewolf kinda wipes the cache, maybe google can fingerprint that way but across different websites they don’t know my activities because I run ublock origin and privacy badger with all filter lists on, not to mention protonvpn’s tracking filter enabled

i watch videos on invidious. i noticed that the “popular” tab shows videos related to videos i watched before.

Can you clarify what you mean here? Videos you watched before on your Youtube account? Or videos you watched before on the same Invidious instance?

An Invidious instance, is basically just somebody else letting you use their Youtube account. So if you watch videos about fish, then that Youtube account is going to start getting recommendations for fish, and you’ll see them on that Invidious instance. All Google knows, is that the youtube account viewed some fish videos. Google wouldn’t know that it was actually you using that Youtube account.

There are still risks though. If you used to watch a lot of fish videos while signed into a personal Youtube account, and then you start watching similar fish videos on Invidious, Google can connect you to the Invidious instance. Another danger is that the Invidious instance could be working with Google.

One test you can do, if you have an actual Youtube account. First go to Invidious and watch some videos on a topic you never watched before. Then go to your actual Youtube account and see if the recommendation feed contain videos on that topic.

OP, I’ve tried your experiment with Invidious + Tor browser. I’ve watched some vids about cooking. Then restarted Tor. Went back to the same Invidious instance. It didn’t show me any of what I watched. I got just the default vids for that instance.

Hard to say what might be doing that for you. So, afraid I can’t be of much more help about that :(

just how to get webisites to stop knowing everything i do across multiple identities and every device i use

It’s very hard. Unfortunately. You’re up against the best data scientists in the world. And up against a legion of identity brokers. Believe me they are very very clever. If there is ANY way to deduce ppl’s idenity they will find and exploit it.

I won’t say it’s impossible to do. But it’s one of those probs, where you have to block every method. They only need a single method you missed. On top of that, many sites won’t even let you in at all, if the identity broker server they use behind the scenes can’t peg your IRL ID with a threshold of confidence.

edit: deepseek says this: “Popular: This feed is generated internally by the Invidious instance you are using. Its content can be specific to that instance and is often based on the combined subscriptions of its users. For example, a “Popular” feed might show videos that are popular among all the users of that particular Invidious instance” take that with a grain of salt or what you will

Fingerprinting.

Invidious likely isn’t profiling you. If it worries you that much, you can stand up your own instance. It seems like a fun project.

That said, you absolutely don’t need to justify your desire for privacy here. I totally understand you. I’ve kind of landed on a “best effort” approach where I just try not to break shit but use as much privacy focuses stuff I can and check if my browser has a randomized fingerprint on EFF’s coveryourtracks.eff.org/, which you should visit. I use Helium and a small number of addons and that’s it.

Here’s the bottom line. You’re not going to be able to disappear on the internet without a massive and cumbersome effort which is not worth it relative to what I am gathering about your threat model. The very first thing you should do when considering privacy is 1. What you want to keep private and 2. Who you are trying to keep it private from. At the end of the day, you sound like me. I want to keep my browsing history and as much of my personal information as private as possible from data brokers, advertisers and my ISP. For that you need a layered approach. 1, VPN with no logs like mullvad. 2, Encrypted or at the very least recursive DNS resolver. 3, A somewhat randomized browser fingerprint. The last one is tricky because it’s actually just impossible. You can use stock librewolf to share your fingerprint with other users but imo that doesn’t work for my use case, as there are some pretty radical changes to the way I would have to use the internet, so I use Helium, which uses fingerprint farbling, and call it a day.

In the end, that works for me. It’s important to remember privacy is a spectrum. There is no such thing as total anonymity, everything you do to make yourself more private is productive and helpful. It’s about assessing your threat model and taking the correct steps, not trying to become a ghost, because that will drive you nuts and your internet browsing experience will be so degraded you might as well not even use it in the first place.

First, are you saying convenience or connivance?

Also, other questions:

1. you’re using a Google AP?
2. What’s your “private friendly” OS?
3. Are you signing into your browser by chance?
4. If you’re looking at popular, I’d think that’s the same for everybody. Recommended would be based off what you watched, no?

You never cleared your browser cache.

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.

Hmmm very bizarre that none of those options are working for you. Those should be extremely secure ways of browsing the web.

Just to confirm, are you logging in to anything? Youtube and google can track you anywhere if you sign in to an account.

When you restart Tor and visit youtube, it should be asking you about cookies again. I make a habit of declining everything anyway.

Perhaps your Google access point is the culprit but it would have to be breaking encryption to affect your connection so surely not?

I’d recommend getting your hands on some bitcoin. Then you can convert it to monero and pay for a vpn that way. A secure vpn and librewolf should be enough to feel like you’re not being tracked.