Since consumer spending is in the tank and retailers are closest to this problem, they need to find every possible way to extract every ounce of revenue from their customers. Web analytics – tracking online shoppers – makes this process a hell of a lot easier, but it does come with a bit of controversy. Privacy remains a hot-button issue, and nobody likes to be followed.

But we are. We're followed everywhere. There are no secrets.

For a while, I saw a guy leaning on a wall in Herald Square, at the corner of W. 34th St. and Broadway in Manhattan. He didn't speak, but I could hear a click come from his direction every time someone walked by. With varying degrees of formality, this happens in every store. Store managers need to know how many people walk by their stores; how many of them actually enter; whether they buy anything; and how much they spend. More exact measures include loyalty and rewards programs. When your card is swiped – and the discount registers or the points tick up – the retailer gathers intelligence. You are being tracked.

For some reason, however, tracking on the web worries people. Of course, there's plenty of information that can be gathered, more than the retailers can pick up through physical means. And there has been no shortage of high-profile data security failures. So, we're all hyper-conscious of what can go wrong. Still, we rely on this. Much of how the online – and even brick-and-mortar – sales process works is based on the tracking and data that give online shoppers the willies.

Coremetrics, which works with Macy's, Petco and REI, among others, notes that consumers are 50% more likely to click through a targeted e-mail than one that's generic. We respond to exactness. Not only do we prefer e-mails that show our names and reflect what we want to see, but we like to check on deals that are attuned to what we like. If I'm on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), I'm pretty happy when I see a recommendation pop up that gives me a book I may not have known about otherwise and that I'd really like to read. This doesn't happen without the site tracking my online shopping behavior.

If data were to stay in the retailers hands alone – and the company had the proper controls in place to keep that data from being stolen – concerns wouldn't be as high. Often, though, this data is sold to third parties, which means that consumers don't know where information about them is going. When you register for a store credit card, you know you're making a deal with the store (and the credit card company behind it), but you may not realize that your data could be sold to other stores, and you certainly won't know who the buyers will be. Yet, the entire online retail sales system breaks down without the tracking that occurs.

The game is about to change.

The advent of social media provides new ways for retailers to push their products and track how their audiences respond to specific promotions. Facebook fans and Twitter followers provide more information than ever before, and as both companies will need to find silver bullets to solve their (lack of) revenue and profit problem, the issue of selling data will arise – and it's an absolute no-brainer. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are already wise to this, which is why they pushed for access to Twitter's data.

The use of social media data for search engine indexing is only the first step. Retailers will want analytics, which Twitter says it will include in premium profiles (for pay) that it hopes to release someday. When this is possible, retailers (and other companies) will jump on the analytics to which they have access. And they'll doubtless ask for access to deeper dives into the data, and they'll likely pay richly for it.

Consumers, unsurprisingly, aren't crazy about being tracked. A survey of 1,000 of them conducted by professors from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-Berkeley found that close to 70% of respondents were not thrilled about being tracked online by advertisers, and dissatisfaction with this shot up when the methods were explained to them.

Nonetheless, the consumer remains confused, disliking the tracking but not changing behavior because of it. The National Retail Federation surveyed 2,600 consumers and learned that 23% of them may not increase their online spending this year ... because of shipping costs. Privacy and online tracking clocked in at only 0.1%.