The negative reactions even remind me of The Oatmeal's comic on every time Facebook changes its layout: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
If there were a way to bet money against that statement, I'd be doing it. Honestly, have you been to a mall lately? Did it give off a "trying our best to make shopping less of a bitch" vibe to you?
Web analytics can create value for the consumer because a website can morph to fit the user. Earth malls do not have that option.
And to the extent that this data will be used to inform store placement at all (maybe for new malls; probably just sold to stores in existing malls), it may actually be in the mall's best interest to move popular stores further apart. That way, you're forced to pass shops for which you have no prior expressed interest. Probably Cinnabon. Win?
Simple objective function for the mall: maximize the sum over all paths of the path length times the number of people who took that path.