Again: google tracking you should have nothing to do with invidious and once you've change IP + fingerprint your anonymized setup will share no direct links with your previous setups so no site would be sure enough of your identity to sync video recommendations. It's not just what I am saying, it's a fundamental truth of how the internet works.

Google can only track you with the data you give or allow them to have. A lot of people report their android phones as listening to them and some stuff has come out about that so there exists some chance that your youtube recommendations on youtube could be influenced by one of your devices being able to physically hear the audio of invidious videos you watch coming out of another device's speakers... but that's supposed to only influence ads and you say you use ios so it'd be very unlikely.

The most likely scenario is that your initial conclusions are flawed and in actuality you are being affected by things like confirmation bias. Please look for actual evidence of a device that is not yours using a fresh anonymized setup showing different results from one of your devices with an anonymized setup. Again, the Invidous popular tab should be the same for everyone but based on your words you still seem to think that it being the same despite your efforts means that google is somehow tracking you and is somehow using their tracking data to inject video recommendations into a site they don't control which would basically be impossible on multiple levels because things just don't work that way.

if google can know everything i watched and every device i own so eaisly despite what i do, its safe to say other bad guys can too.

Avoiding google is one of the hardest privacy hurdles because they own and control so much of the infrastructure that many people's internet lives rely on. Other bad guys won't have the same access to google's infrastructure so it's not safe to they can too. And it's very likely that all of them won't be following you after you've anonymized your setup and will make no attempts to do so unless some sort of three letter agency is actually after you specifically.

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.

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.

On one hand I completely agree that people are overreacting to adding a field that anything actually implementing age verification could potentially make use of.

But on the other hand I think people are not overreacting enough (in ways other than pointlessly harassing the names on a pull request) because this is a 'foot in the door' and basically the only way to prevent these vaguely worded laws from fully rooting everywhere would be massive blowback that actually has consequences for the corporations and governments pushing the laws.

But on the third hand, every Linux distribution collectively refusing to abide by the law and blocking California, Brazil, ect. IPs probably wouldn't have much overall impact so time would probably be better spent trying to get the average random person to care... and the average random person definitely does not care about systemd fields...