[jrnichols]

A few good ideas:

don't use the same name on websites. unique username and strong password for each of them.

Use a browser like Brave if you can, or use Ghostery/ublock/etc.

Don't use anything Google at all.

Avoid Facebook the best you can.

I think the VPN is a good idea, and I haven't had one being marked as spam ever. PIA has been decent and has end points in the state that I'm in.

If you want to be a little more obscure, do all of the above but from a virtual machine running Linux. Periodically wipe & restore the virtual machine.

It depends on how anonymous you want to be.