What do you mean by VPNs leaving you open to fingerprinting?
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I assume he means with hardware fingerprinting. Basically websites can collect enough info on your computer to identify you and track you across sites.
Running a VM on your own machine (using VMWare or VirtualBox) with a clean install of the OS and a browser in that should suffice to prevent that. Fingerprinting would be mostly on things like installed apps/fonts, screen resolution, free disk space and such.
VM and a VPN is the same as a cloud instance. You certainly will be tied back to any account hosting a cloud instance if it came to that. You might be thinking a little too paranoid about this, when there is a simple solution.
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.
Burner phone maybe?
AWS Windows box