When taking pictures of these things, you will be dealing with security guards who may demand that the photos taken be deleted. The visual side of these things are protected by copyright and sometimes trade secrets. One of our department stores exceeded the news threshold by the fact that the security guards yelled at the photographer that photography is prohibited in the department store and around 500 meters outside the department store.
Note that the posted pamphlet is specific to the US, but there are some nuances to things like store fronts in the US.
A store or retail establishment(such as a mall) is perfectly within their rights to prohibit photography on their property. That can include inside the store/mall and in the parking lot. They can not, however, prohibit photographing anything that is visible from a public location, or from a location they do not own/control. That means that you are perfectly free to stand on the city-owned sidewalk and photograph storefronts to your heart's content. If you can see them from your back yard or a friend's deck, go right ahead and photograph from there.
Also, no one can compel or coerce you to delete photographs already taken, and especially not private security. As outlined in the pamphlet, the police need a search warrant(which in the US requires probable cause to obtain-a relatively high standard) to view without your permission or require you to show them photos you have taken. If a mall security guard tries to force you to show them your photos or delete them, they could be in pretty serious trouble depending on what they do. Trying to take your camera from you could be assault, damaging your camera would be destruction of property, and forcibly detaining you could be considered false arrest(the last one can vary by state and in some states, how much training the security guard has received). Really, the most they can legally do is tell you to leave, and you CAN be charged with trespass if you refuse to do so.
That's my non-lawyer take on it, and it's also way outside the topic of this thread, but it's also important for everyone to know and is relevant to photography in general. Note that the above pamphlet was written in 2003, a time when a lot of the US was still on edge and very jumpy about anything that could be considered terrorist activity. BTW, the only time I've been bothered or hassled was a few years ago when I was photographing a US Army Corp. of Engineers facility(a lock and dam on the Mississippi river-most locks on inland waterways used for commercial shipping are operated and maintained by the USACE for purposes of interstate commerce and national defense) and had a security guard bug me about what I was doing. They knew that what I was doing was perfectly legal, especially as I was primarily on sidewalks around the public museum at the facility and never ventured anywhere other than locations intended to be public friendly. They also have walking paths and such, and I found myself there in the first place because I was visiting a research facility that my employer owns and operates with an ajoining parking lot, and was actually partially on my employer's property. I finally got tired of talking to them, cut off their question and said "If I'm actually doing something wrong please tell me, otherwise please leave me alone so I can go back to doing what I was doing." They gave me a look of disgust but didn't say anything else for a second so I said "If you can't tell me that I was doing something wrong and just don't like what I was doing and are going to keep harrasing me, get your supervisor out here so that I can file a complaint against you" They paused for a second and just said "have a nice day" and walked off to leave me in peace but sat in their car and glared at me. It was a nice day, I didn't have anywhere to be, and was feeling petty so after I was done I grabbed my laptop out of the car and sat at a picnic table to start looking through and editing the photos I'd taken-I was there for an hour or so, and I think the guard sat and watched me for about 20 minutes before driving around the lot for the rest of the time I was there and slowing down to a near stop every time they passed me-I just smiled and waved.
