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Even anonymized and aggregated consumer data may not be as anonymous as people have been led to believe, according to new academic research.

Researchers concluded that aggregated data — big batches of information on things like mobile devices’ movements, compiled for use in summarized form — can be unraveled to reveal the actual movements of specific individuals with about 73% to 91% accuracy, even from pools combining hundreds of thousands of users.

Companies that provide information to marketers about people’s dining or shopping habits, for example, typically strip the data of personally-identifiable elements like names or addresses, then aggregate it before sending it off for use.

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