You also have to weight the benefits versus the "risk".
For example, if you use FreeTube with SponsorBlock to improve your privacy and block ads, in fact you are sending to Cloudflare 100% of your YouTube watch history, and to SponsorBlock ("sponsor.ajay.io").
With Piped instances it's even worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers.
If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.
It's easy, simple, and you have the benefits of an audited platform and that reasonably legally confirm they don't store logs unless the court forced them: "we never log their activity unless ordered by a court never log their activity unless ordered by a court", but for that, the court has to find you as a user, which can be very complicated in practice.
Way better than the recommended "privacy" instances.
NordVPN only sees that you connect to YouTube, they do not see the pages or videos that you are looking at, and from the perspective of YouTube, they only see requests from a very popular VPN where are millions of users.
If you use the "privacy" instances, these "privacy" websites and Cloudflare knows precisely which videos you are watching.
Recommended by whom? I'm just saying your advice is terrible in general and takes no regard to how easy and powerful fingerprinting is nowadays, in google's perspective the only difference to using that VPN if you're "just" running chrome is that it also knows when you use a VPN, in other words, just giving one more data point. Also the average user is likely to install some nordvpn app if following your advice, which is a security nightmare, remember that company sells residential proxies.
Also IIRC for youtube, alternative frontends don't tend to rely on someone else's endpoints.
> worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers
I'd much rather send random tidbits of information, that are nearly useless in isolation, to strangers than to the central tracking corporation
In the end, there is no way to reveal what information you're interested in when retrieving data, short of retrieving a ton of data and doing the filtering client-side, which is also an option with these third parties if you so desire
For example, if you use FreeTube with SponsorBlock to improve your privacy and block ads, in fact you are sending to Cloudflare 100% of your YouTube watch history, and to SponsorBlock ("sponsor.ajay.io").
With Piped instances it's even worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers.
If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.
It's easy, simple, and you have the benefits of an audited platform and that reasonably legally confirm they don't store logs unless the court forced them: "we never log their activity unless ordered by a court never log their activity unless ordered by a court", but for that, the court has to find you as a user, which can be very complicated in practice.
So much better than random strangers.