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I have never heard of parallel VPNs and could not find more than the following site - https://thesafety.us/en/parallel_vpn - relating to it.
As I understood it, the idea is to set up two parallel tunnels by e.g. using a VPN connection on your router and then setting up a second to another server on your PC. This is supposed to encrypt the data flow twice.
My question is: Does it really help increasing your anonymity or is it just a hoax?
Potentially.
If you have two separate VPN providers, both would need to keep logs of your connection which then could be traced back to you. I would find a trustworthy VPN provider and just keep one, more than one is just paranoid, or for those that risk sever repercussions in case of being discovered (in which case I wouldn't do it from my home anyway).
There are many other ways to be identified over the internet, so don't think that having a VPN or a fancy parallel VPN is all you need. Take a look at IPLeak.net. The cookies of a particular website, for example, are used to identify you. If you visit or login to that website even once without your VPN you will be recognized by them even when using the VPN.
Anonymity is achieved by common sense and good IT knowledge, not a fancy VPN.
It helps if one of your VPN connections gets compromised. It will however decrease the performance (latency, bit-rate) of your connection. The onion routing technique, used in the Tor network, is in principle based on the same idea.
I found a related article which might be of interest to you: Advanced Privacy and Anonymity Using VMs, VPN’s, Tor – Creating Nested Chains of VPNs and Tor [1].
[1] https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/advanced-privacy-and-anonymity-part-8
Internet anonymity is only as good as you capabilities of AVOID leaving possible traits that allow third part to track you.
VPN services will not increase your anonymity if you go to websites that drop cookies and other payload that track you. E.g., if you sign in your facebook account and perform interaction with others, it will not improve your "anonymity". Site like facebook does share data through their "API" and cookies, which they claim "to provide better user experience".
In some cases, you will aware of some perculiar happening : after you logout of SNP site, and subsequent website seems "know and follow your shopping wish-list".
In fact, the VPN - Virtual Private Network already spoke it all. It is mean to setup secure virtual network that are private to stop eavesdropping on unsecure public network, e.g. WiFi network in fastfood chains,etc.
