Death Note Anonymity analysis by Gwern.
I think it would be valuable to read for people here, especially newbies and "privacy bros" to understand how ~~privacy~~ (anonymity) actually works.
Given a perfect weapon, can you commit a perfect crime?
The answer is surprisingly close to no.
Everything you do bleeds information.
A perfect crime is one that wasn't even noticed. If a perfect crime gets noticed it immediately reveals the following: you are smart and you have the knowledge and weapons to commit a perfect crime, and in a murder you must have had a motive, instantly ruling out 99% of the human population.
On the web you can be tracked using almost anything: browser window size, word choice, times you are online, internet connection delay, negative qualities like not giving your language will exclude the majority of people who do.
In fact, just this post alone is sufficient to narrow me down to less than a million (maybe even a few thousand) people.
Edit: This is actually about anonymity, privacy is slightly different, but I think this is still relevant to privacy.
From my knowledge VPNs hide your IP from the destination, and the destination from your ISP.
Fingerprinting is mostly about the browser you use.
For VPN any VPN should do (eg. Mullvad VPN $5/month) and for Browser just have a non-big tech browser with ad-blockers and tracking protection (eg. Mullvad Browser or other Firefox/fork with good config).
Or Tor
Also, how serious is the "not getting tracked" need? It sounds like you are getting hunted by the social media site? Wouldn't that need full OPSEC mode with Tails and Whonix like the real darknet hackers?
For the VM, I can't help you much. There should be tones of cloud hosting providers out there, just a Linux VM on another guy's computer after all.
PS: I am a newbie just repeating stuff I heard before like a parrot.