I recently learned that I have to pay meta for them to not steal my private data for their ads.
I have a vpn, and I am wondering if that is enough to prevent them from getting my data?
Because I have friends on instagram that I don’t want to lose and I have a training group that only posts updates and schedules on facebook. So i don’t feel like I can delete them.
No, FB sells the data you willingly gave them via posts, comments and personal info you put on the site after logging in. They don’t spy or eavesdrop via man in the middle methods which is what VPN is designed to protect against.
VPN changes where you appear to be and encrypts traffic between you and the VPN provider. You will not be protected from tracking cookies, data mining, or anything else.
Two items to really help with that are the extensions ublock origin and decentraleyes. Those two browser extensions will block a lot of tracking cookies, ads, etc. Both are free. I use them on my phone (Android with Firefox) and my computers. They are available for chrome, Firefox, brave, etc.
It can also help to use a browser like Firefox or brave, both are more privacy centric than chrome.
That’s not how VPNs work. If you willingly access Facebook and Instagram, even while using a VPN, then you’ve given them access to your data. The original purpose of VPNs was to allow employees to remotely access their company’s network securely over the public internet. In your case if you used a VPN, you would still access Facebook and Instagram servers via whatever VPN provider’s server you use over the public internet. The VPN doesn’t actually hide your identity nor your data.
Comment ID=k7gzvqn Ciphertext:
!SeTnFiJhHeea75NdOS8U5L+ay9KlsdLsZZyHRV/9OURidHNJRVGc3/ZjxHYfj2S2K1rvk6UNldWEykKBFfQYpxbxBToOzcvJBPv9rsUdp7K3lboM+Q07io/Iraefr5bzmG4+Ri68RguaQQRhTMq8uslVqSkUiYpKoYYSlNRts3GYqEYawL0MztogUC8I2Fi5vuykc0Z9!<
by deleting your Facebook and instagram accounts.
nope. They can still track everything you do on the site and even some things you do on different sites. You might obscure some information like your location.
Perhaps a dumb question but will the things I like and share contribute to the data i willing give away? And they can they collect what I write in DMs and such?
Don’t even need to be logged in. when you land at any place that shows you the “like” button, even if you’re not logged in you’ll be tracked.
OP should look into the fascinating world of ‘browser fingerprinting’ 
Literally anything you do on a Facebook service is up for grabs. Most of what you do on FB is public (likes, shares, comments, posts, etc). Your DMs are not public, but messaging isn’t end-to-end encrypted, so they can see it for sure. We can’t know if they scan your DMs, but I’d err on the side of caution and say that they do.
Remember, Facebook has already been caught several times to be in breach of its own user agreement and European privacy legislation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that Facebook shares way more data than they let on. Their battles with the EU were about Facebook breaching GDPR regulations, wherein they exported data from their Irish HQ to the US (the GDPR stipultates that they need to ask express permission from each and every user to be allowed to export their data outside of the EU).
I don’t know FBs exact TOS but there is nothing stopping them from using all your data as they please and more importantly, a VPN cannot prevent them from doing so.
Simply stopping on a post in your feed is data to them. Every interaction is tracked, even passive ones. They also read your cookies and other installed app data
I am not sure how new is this option but you can actually choose to have your messenger DMs E2E encrypted. It works on per chat basis and I’m not sure if you can do it on group chats, but it can be set up.