Retailers are increasingly being urged to mine customer to data to improve their retail merchandising strategies and better target consumers.

However, Minnesota Public Radio recently warned companies that they need to be wary of not breaching customers' privacy, as Target was accused of doing last month. The Minnesota-based retailer was called out for using customer shopping patterns to identify which consumers are expecting and thus determine the coupons they receive at checkout and the items marketed to them on the website.

Yet, what may have seemed like a solid marketing strategy was revealed to have gaping holes in terms of respect to privacy at the Predictive Analytics World conference, where one attendee called the practice "Orwellian."

"What Target is doing there is unusual, because typically what retailers and other companies do is they predict what will you buy," Eric Siegel, an analytics consultant who has taught at Columbia University, told the source. "Obviously, whether somebody is pregnant is definitely a private concept. That's certainly sensitive information."

For retailers to stay on the right side of consumers' affections, giving them the opportunity to opt-in into data targeting efforts is a good start.