Is it a windows machine? Maybe it uses a Microsoft account that they can immediately match to you.
Out of curiosity, how did you pay for this machine and your other tech? Did you use the same card/payment system? Buy from the same store or site?
The human mind loves to find patterns. You’re ignoring every video that doesn’t stand out and just zeroing in on the ones that do. The truth is, someone else watching the same videos you are probably has similar tastes.
Ad blockers only stop ads from loading and trackers from collecting detailed info like mouse movement and time in page. Google, can still see what IP visits a page if there are Google ads or Google owned things like reCAPTCHA.
Fingerprint resistance only makes it harder for data to be collected without having the IP address. Google doesn’t need my IP even if ads across specific pages flag a rare combo of graphics card, fonts, dark mode, and time zone. All you’re really hoping for is plausible deniability that poisons the data of a random IP you’re on.
Invidious is supposed to hide your IP as a proxy, but unless you’re using an instance of it with your alt front end specifically, you’re still doing everything from the same IP. Are you sure you have the Invidious instance set up correctly?
who hasn’t watched MrBeast at least once?
raises hand
I’ve hard of him but I can’t say I could pick him off a lineup. Fascinating phenomenon this rise of planetary celebrities that can be completely unknown to the non-wired - Or to certain demographics, I am pretty online myself but I had no idea who say, Pewdiepie was but I noticed he was equally well known in Europe, the US and Asia
The same public IP address. From the outside it looks no different than one machine running like 4 browsers and 5 apps connected to the internet. Local network assigns unique local IPs to every device in 192.168.xxx.xxx.
After insight from some users, I could very well be a little too paranoid.
Test on another machine/device, or linux distro. As another other user said, it might be you’re Microsoft account.
Well just use your browser in private mode and with adblocker. … I do that to, and I dont have any advertisings.
then i’ll hazard a guess at the videos just being more related than you think - perhaps despite being different topics, the demographics and “type of person” that watch them overlap; combined with regular ol coincidences it can seem deceptively profound
I don’t know if anyone has that answer, sounds a little bit crazy but at this point anything is possible.
Oh I thought of that, so I installed windows without creating a MS account (had to jump through a bunch of hoops though!) or connecting to the internet. I also used OOSU10 to disable and/or remove the bulk of MS telemetry. But I’m still considering the possibility that windows can still do things that compromise privacy.
Same payment system, but not from one store/site.
You know, that could very well be it.
someone else watching the same videos you are probably has similar tastes.
This also applies to a lot of tracking people think happens.
People say stuff like “I was talking about product X and then got an ad for it”, but in a lot of cases it might just be because loads of other people who are similar are also interested in product X (there is obviously still a lot of tracking going on in this scenario but not quite as much as “listening to every conversation”)
People aren’t as unique as they think they are
“Are you sure you have the Invidious instance set up correctly?”
It sure seems that way. Under “Current Invidious Instance” I set one of them. It even says it’s the set default instance. Furthermore, I disabled the “Fallback to Non-Preferred Backend on Failure” option. In case the preferred API (Invidious) fails to load content, this option would fallback to the local API, meaning it will connect to YT’s API using my actual (Vee PN, actually) IP address.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll try this on a linux virtual machine (or would that somehow compromise privacy?). I don’t have a MS account, though. Well, I had one years ago, but deleted it.
Quite possible. I could be a little too paranoid due to Google’s reputation and track record.
It breaks being anonymous since you are routing all of your Tor traffic to a vpn, which can be traced to you.