Big Executive Moves Within Hispanic Media

In a statement, Fusion announced that it had appointed Isaac Lee, the president of Univision News, as its chief executive. He will be in charge of programming and business development for the network, which is expected to make its debut Oct. 28, and replaces Beau Ferrari, the executive vice president of operations for Univision Networks who had been serving as the interim president of Fusion.

“Isaac is one of the most creative executives I know,” Randy Falco, the president and chief executive of Univision Communications, said in a statement. “His innovation and commitment makes him the right person in this expanded role.”

Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, said Mr. Lee’s “deep understanding of content that is relevant to Latinos and millennials will be critical as we bring together diverse cultures, voices and viewpoints to serve this influential and growing audience in the months and years ahead.”

Speculation about who would lead the network intensified after Cesar Conde, the president of Univision’s networks division since 2009, announced last month that he was leaving to become an executive vice president at NBCUniversal, the parent company of Telemundo, a rival Spanish-language network to Univison.

Telemundo had its own executive shake-up on Friday after Joe Uva, the chairman of Hispanic enterprises and content at NBCUniversal, sent an internal e-mail to staff announcing that Emilio Romano, the president of Telemundo, was stepping down. In the e-mail, Mr. Uva, who had been the president and chief executive at Univision from 2007 to 2011, thanked Mr. Romano for his contributions to Telemundo.

“His focus on positioning Telemundo to take share from Univision, and Mun2 to better resonate with the rapidly growing millennial population has established a foundation for growth,” Mr. Uva wrote, referring to the bilingual cable channel. “As a result, he has been instrumental in elevating the perception of Telemundo in the marketplace. Most recently, he has been a good partner to me.”

Mr. Uva, who has held his current position at NBCUniversal since April, said that he expected to begin the search for a replacement at Telemundo immediately and that he would be spending more time at the network’s Florida headquarters in the coming weeks.

Mr. Romano’s tenure ends exactly two years after he was named president of Telemundo. In 2011, Mr. Romano, a former chief executive for Grupo Mexicana de Aviación, the Mexican airline carrier, succeeded Don Browne. Mr. Romano declined to comment.

DealBook: His Ties Severed, Ackman Moves to Sell Stake in J.C. Penney

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Stocks Fall as Traders Prepare for Fed Moves

The stock market dropped on Monday for a fourth consecutive trading session as investors continued to worry about the recent rise in interest rates in anticipation that the Federal Reserve would soon begin to wind down its huge economic stimulus.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 70.73 points, or 0.47 percent, to 15,010.74. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost 9.77 points, or 0.59 percent, to 1,646.06. The Nasdaq composite index fell 13.69 points, or 0.38 percent, to 3,589.09.

Investors had little data to digest on Monday, so the focus for many remained the continuing climb in bond yields. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.88 percent, from 2.83 percent Friday, as the note’s price declined 15/32, to 96 23/32.

The 10-year Treasury yield has risen sharply from a low of 1.63 percent reached in early May as the economy has improved and as investors begin expecting the Fed to start tapering its $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program as early as next month.

“We’ve been in this artificially low interest rate environment for so long, it’s hard to figure out what normal is,” said Jim Dunigan, chief investment officer with PNC Wealth Management.

The quick rise in bond yields has worried some investors because it leads to higher interest rates on many kinds of loans, including home mortgages and corporate loans.

“I do think we’re not too far away from that point in time where this heavy increase in bond yields is going to start impacting the markets,” said Doug Peebles, chief investment officer of AllianceBernstein Fixed Income.

Home builders were hit hard on Monday as traders were concerned that higher mortgage rates could upset a recovery in the housing market. Lennar, PulteGroup and D.R. Horton all fell roughly 4 percent.

Bank stocks dropped after a report from the Federal Reserve appeared to indicate that large bank holding companies — including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America — may need to raise additional capital. JPMorgan fell $1.46, or 2.7 percent, to $51.83, while Bank of America lost 27 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $14.15. Morgan Stanley dropped 66 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $25.81.

Wall Street will be focused on the Fed this week, trying to forecast its intentions. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve will publish the minutes of its July policy meeting, and on Thursday the Fed starts its annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

U.S. Moves to Seize Dietary Supplement From GNC Warehouses

With names like Jack3d and OxyElitePro, the workout products contain a stimulant called dimethylamylamine, or DMAA for short. In April, the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers that DMAA was an illegal dietary ingredient and that products containing the stimulant could elevate blood pressure, potentially leading to heart attacks.

After the agency’s warning, USPlabs, the maker of Jack3d and OxyElite Pro, said the company for business reasons had decided to stop making DMAA products. Some leading retailers withdrew their remaining stocks of DMAA products from store shelves, but GNC continued to sell its inventory.

Greg Miller, a spokesman for GNC, said in an e-mail on Friday that the company believed DMAA to be a “safe, legal dietary ingredient.”

But in a challenge to GNC, the Justice Department, acting at the behest of the F.D.A., requested court-ordered seizures this week of both Jack3d and OxyElitePro from GNC warehouses in Leetsdale, Pa., and Anderson, S.C.

According to a complaint filed in Federal District Court in Pittsburgh, the F.D.A. conducted an inspection of the GNC warehouse in Leetsdale this month and collected physical samples, photographed the products and seized shipping records. After the inspection, F.D.A. officials notified GNC that the products were adulterated and being illegally held by the company. On June 11, the F.D.A. ordered GNC to detain the products.

Federal prosecutors filed a similar complaint on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Anderson, S.C., seeking a seizure of the same products at a GNC facility there.

Because the dietary supplement industry tends to voluntarily heed F.D.A. public advisories, the agency rarely feels compelled to take the aggressive tack of seizing products.

Shelly L. Burgess, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment.

Mr. Miller, the GNC spokesman, said the company would not distribute the products at its Leetsdale warehouse until the issue with the F.D.A. had been resolved. But, he said, “GNC will continue to sell through its remaining inventory of the products in its stores.”

Mr. Miller added that it was unclear to the company why the F.D.A. had initiated the seizure request, given that DMAA-containing products were no longer being made and that distributors other than GNC also had inventories of the products.

“Given this situation,” Mr. Miller wrote in his e-mail, “it is hard to view this action as anything other than a biased agency action against GNC in retaliation for GNC’s stance on DMAA.”

Since early 2008, the F.D.A. has received reports of at least 86 health problems, including at least five deaths, in consumers who used DMAA products. Although such reports do not prove that the stimulant directly caused health problems, agency officials have warned people not to consume the ingredient.

Bits Blog: Tech Moves to the Background as Design Becomes Foremost

Stephen Lam/Reuters Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, discussing the redesign of its mobile software system.

In the last few decades, the computing industry has passed through several different eras. In the ’90s, the big tech companies were in a race for faster and more powerful computers. Then in the 2000s, the industry moved to mobile in a quest for slimmer phones with brighter screens.

Now, the industry is entering the era of design.

As I noted in my column this week, Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to Software Design, tech companies are looking for ways to make sure the user interfaces of their products are unique.

Design experts I spoke with noted that many of the devices we use today look almost exactly the same, which explains the emphasis on the software that goes into that interface. Battery life and processing speed are only marginally different within product categories such as smartphones. But the look and feel of the software is what allows a competitor to leap ahead of the competition.

Cesar Torres, a former Apple designer who now works for Sidecar, a ride-sharing start-up, said on Twitter: “While I don’t agree with the stylistic choices in iOS 7, it excites me that ‘design’ is a term that shows up in major news site headlines.”

Design, it seems, is becoming a mainstream topic. And for those who have lived and breathed design for decades, it’s a refreshing change.

“In the ’90s when I would meet with investors, there was no return on investment for design. Yet today, 20 years later, every project I do is because design is seen as absolutely central,” said Yves Béhar, the founder of Fuseproject, a San Francisco design agency.

Mr. Béhar said that, now, directors, chief executives and investors often sit in meetings and ask about user interface, overall experience, and the look and feel of a product. Twenty years ago, most investors wouldn’t even know what those terms meant.

What the mainstream and the financiers are now starting to realize is that design is a doorway to something much more important.

“Design, even if you’re talking about Apple and their sexy devices, is a promise of quality,” explained James Victore, an award-winning art director, designer, and author. “It’s a promise that the public is not going to be let down.”

As Culture Moves Online, France Tries to Follow It With a Tax

PARIS — France’s “cultural exception” — the policy that creative works like books, music and movies deserve protection beyond what is accorded ordinary goods — is in line for a digital update.

A government adviser has suggested that manufacturers pay a 1 percent levy on the price of smartphones and tablet computers to help keep funding for such works alive, as more and more end up online and beyond the reach of existing taxes.

The tax, “painless for the consumer,” could also be used to ensure that artists are remunerated at a time when so much is downloaded free, said the report, which was presented Monday to President François Hollande and his culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti.

“Considering the weight of cultural content in connected devices, it is legitimate that those who make and distribute the equipment contribute to the financing of its creation,” according to the report, produced under the guidance of a former television executive and journalist, Pierre Lescure.

“L’exception culturelle” is no trifling matter: Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, warned in March that it was “a red line” that could not be crossed in talks with the United States on a proposed free-trade area. France and 13 other European Union member nations insisted in a letter this week that the audiovisual sector must be left out of those talks, setting up a possible confrontation with the British prime minister, David Cameron, who has said that everything should be on the table.

In practice, the cultural exception means broadcasters must meet quotas for French music and television programming, for example, and prices for books are set by regulators. The effort stretches throughout the economy, requiring a system of taxes and subsidies for its upkeep, perhaps most visibly in the country’s film industry, which gets hundreds of million euros each year in subsidies — raised from taxes on movie tickets, television stations and Internet service providers — to defend itself from the Hollywood juggernaut.

But technology threatens to render such measures irrelevant, the report noted. The nature of Internet commerce means foreigners can have access to the French market without having to pay the levies that support French culture. And as more content is streamed online or stored in the cloud, a tax on recording media like blank compact discs and memory sticks will raise less money — and that is where the smartphone tax comes in.

Gilles Vercken, an intellectual property lawyer, acknowledged that streaming and the cloud would bring down those levies, which he estimated currently raise about €200 million, or $260 million, a year to support French authors, composers, actors, musicians and the like. But he expressed skepticism that the smartphone tax would see the light of day.

“I wonder what could be the legal grounds for such taxes,” he said, noting that the connection between hardware manufacturers and end users might prove a difficult one to defend in court. “I really don’t see it.”

Monica Horten, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics who studies the politics of intellectual property rights, said that, in principle, such levies were possible under E.U. law, but that “the problem is in the implementation.”

The first issue would be drafting a law acceptable to the European Court of Justice, while another would be in actually getting device makers on board to pay the tax. “I think you can expect them to filibuster,” she said.

The report seeks to address a problem that is as old as the Internet, which has shifted the balance of power away from content creators in favor of newer actors like Google, Amazon and peer-to-peer downloading services, even as it gives creators previously unimagined opportunities to be seen or heard.

In addressing such matters, France has sometimes chosen to fight battles that other governments have shied away from. For instance, Google agreed in February to set up a €60 million fund to help French newspaper and magazine publishers develop their digital business, though it managed to fend off demands that it pay for the right to link to their content.

And the Lescure report comes less than two weeks after Arnaud Montebourg, the minister for industrial renewal, put the kibosh on a sale to Yahoo of a majority stake in Dailymotion, a French rival to YouTube, because the government had singled out the company as a national champion and did not want control falling into foreign hands.

The Lescure report also suggests that France throw out a “three-strikes” anti-piracy law that Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, had held up as one of his signature achievements and one that had been hailed by the global entertainment industry. Under the Hadopi Law, as it is known, illegal downloaders were to have their Internet access cut off if they failed to heed three warnings; violators were also to be subject to criminal sanctions and large fines. In practice, there has been little enforcement action, though proponents credit the law with helping to reduce Internet piracy.

If Mr. Lescure’s recommendations are followed, law enforcement will focus on the worst violators, and most people would face minimal fines. A proposed “Hadopi authority” would be eliminated, and responsibility for enforcement would revert to the national media regulator, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel.

Morrison & Foerster Partner Moves to Mori Hamada

Former Morrison & Foerster Tokyo partner Tony Grundy has joined Japanese law firm Mori Hamada & Matsumoto as a senior of counsel in Singapore.

Grundy, who focuses on capital markets, structured finance and bank lending, mainly advises financial institutions, borrowers and trustees.

He joined Morrison & Foerster in 2008 from Linklaters, where he was a partner for more than two decades. From 2000 to 2007, Grundy was managing partner of Linklaters' Tokyo office, which he helped launch in 1987. He also previously headed the U.K. firm's Singapore office and worked stints in its London and Hong Kong offices.

Mori Hamada opened its Singapore office in 2011 to target Japanese companies expanding in Southeast Asia. The Tokyo-based firm, which has 336 lawyers, now counts six lawyers in Singapore, including Grundy.

In a separate move, Mori Hamada has announced that the former head of Japan's top competition authority is joining the firm as a non-lawyer adviser in its Tokyo headquarters.

Kazuhiko Takeshima served as chairman of the Japan Fair Trade Commission from 2002 until last year. During that time, he successfully pushed for more aggressive prosecutions and stiffer penalties for antitrust violations. Prior to leading the JFTC, Takeshima also held a series of other senior government positions, including heading the national tax agency and serving as director general of the economic planning agency.

Gene-Altered Fish Moves Closer to Federal Approval

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IP Boutique Co-Founder Moves to Kilpatrick

Tina McKeon says joining a larger firm allows her to focus on her practice rather than administration.
John Disney, Daily Report

Tina McKeon has left the intellectual property boutique she helped found for Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton. As a result, McKeon Meunier Carlin & Curfman, which McKeon launched in spring 2010, is now Meunier Carlin & Curfman.

"It's difficult to leave something that you started and put your heart and soul into, but I found that the practice I have would benefit from the depth and infrastructure a large firm can offer," said McKeon, who joined Kilpatrick as a partner last week.

McKeon focuses her patent prosecution and counseling work on life sciences and brings a team of five with her. Three patent agents, Kimberlynn Davis, Lizette Fernandez and Tiffany Thomas, who like McKeon have Ph.D. degrees, will join on Monday, along with a paralegal, Joey Ward, and an assistant, Christy Rutherford.

McKeon declined to name clients, saying they are still in transition. She said she works with a mix of large companies, startups, universities and research institutions.

Although McKeon has practiced patent law since 1996, she said she's never worked in a general practice firm until now. She was a partner at Fish & Richardson, a national IP boutique, before starting McKeon Meunier Carlin & Curfman 2 1/2 years ago with another Fish & Richardson partner, Andrew Meunier.

Christopher Curfman from Ballard Spahr and Gregory Carlin, who had been IP counsel at Edwards Lifesciences in Irvine, Calif., are the other two principals.

McKeon joined Fish & Richardson in 2006 from a local IP boutique, Needle & Rosenberg, which became part of Philadelphia-based general practice firm Ballard Spahr in 2008.

She cited Kilpatrick's "strong IP group and strong reputation both nationally and internationally" and said she was friends with a number of Kilpatrick lawyers, including Jamie Graham, who is the co-leader of Kilpatrick's health and life sciences team, John McDonald and Virginia Taylor, along with John Pratt, who chairs the firm's IP practice, and James Ewing IV.

"It was not a hard choice," said McKeon.

Graham said in a statement that ­McKeon's "well-established reputation within the biotechnology community and her extensive background in highly complex research and litigation" will add to Kilpatrick's "deep bench of biotechnology expertise in Atlanta and across the firm."

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Strategies: Central Banks’ Moves Are Giving Global Stocks a Lift

The overall economy is sluggish at best, and unemployment has remained above 8 percent since early 2009. Yet despite a decline last week, stock investors have been on a roll. In the three months ended on Friday, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 5.8 percent. In Europe, stocks fared even better for the quarter, with the Euro Stoxx 50 index up 8.4 percent. Japan was a laggard, as the Nikkei index dropped 1.5 percent, but in Hong Kong the Hang Seng index rose 7.2 percent.

During much of this period, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been flooding the planet with money. Cause and effect is hard to prove, but it seems reasonable to assume that the central banks have had something to do with the markets’ buoyancy. “Clearly central bank actions have been a major factor in the market rally,” Ethan Harris, chief North American economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a recent report. News reports of “super dovish” announcements by the Fed and the European Central Bank correlated neatly with stock market climbs, he found.

On Sept. 6, for example, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, said that under certain conditions it would buy unlimited amounts of government bonds, a move that could lower borrowing costs for Spain and other troubled countries in the euro zone. Stocks immediately rose around the world.

The next week, the Fed met the market’s expectations, and then some. It extended its plans for maintaining near-zero short-term interest rates into the middle of 2015. And it announced that it would increase its bond-buying to a total of $85 billion a month for the rest of the year, with a focus on mortgage-backed securities, a program aimed at giving the housing market another lift. What’s more, the Fed linked the duration of its loose policies to the state of the job market. As long as the unemployment rate remained unacceptably high, the Fed planned to maintain its expansionary monetary policy, Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said in a news conference.

“We will be looking for the sort of broad-based growth in jobs and economic activity that generally signal sustained improvement in labor market conditions and declining unemployment,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Last week, however, the markets gave up ground. The central banks aside, it’s easy to see why the bullish mood might darken quickly. A partial list of dangers includes rising tensions in the Mideast, a contentious election campaign and a looming “fiscal cliff” in the United States, an unresolved and multifaceted financial crisis in Europe, and a global economy that is far from robust.

Little of this would appear to augur well for stocks, except that the central banks have tilted the odds on the bullish side, at least for now, some analysts say.

“A modestly growing economy with the cyclically sensitive sectors at still-depressed levels is a relatively stable and safe, if not exciting, environment,” said Larry Kantor, head of research at Barclays, in a recent report. “When this is combined with a central bank committed to aggressively supporting growth through higher asset prices, it amounts to a very attractive environment for taking risk.”

In fact, Barclays calls the current version of its flagship quarterly research publication “Global Outlook: Don’t Fight the Fed.”

OF course, no one knows where the markets are going day to day. After their recent run upward, and even without the emergence of any nasty news, stocks could easily “consolidate,” that is, decline for a while before moving upward again. And because the global economy is already rather weak, an external shock — a disruptive geopolitical event — could alter perceptions abruptly.

Some analysts are not upbeat even now. The Economic Cycle Research Institute, an independent forecasting organization with an excellent record, says it believes that the United States is already in recession, and that action by the Fed won’t change that. “Unfortunately, the economy is just going to have to ride out the business cycle,” Lakshman Achuthan, chief operations officer of the institute, said recently. “The Fed’s actions have been increasingly ineffective.” The relationship between the economy and the stock market is complex, he said, and it’s not always clear whether the market is predicting the direction of the economy, reacting to it or responding to other factors.

Robert Rodriguez, managing partner and chief executive of FPA, an asset management firm in Los Angeles, says it’s possible that fund managers, seeking to bolster their returns, will “continue to pile into stocks in the remainder of this year and push them to even higher levels.” But he says he believes that the market is already overextended, and his firm has begun to reduce its stock exposure.

Mr. Rodriguez anticipated the subprime mortgage crisis and the financial crisis. But, as he acknowledged ruefully in an interview, he “was early, and got out of the market too soon, and could well be doing so again.” Still, he says he fears what he calls “the unintended consequences of the expansionary activities of the central banks.”

Another credit bubble is likely if the banks persist in trying to prop up the global economy, he said. As he sees it, the fundamental problem in the United States can’t be solved by the Fed. “We must get our fiscal house in order,” he said, “and we have only a limited amount of time to do it.”

For the next several months, though, he suspects that Wall Street’s fascination with the Fed may well keep stocks rising.

F.T.C. Moves to Tighten Online Privacy Protections for Children

The moves come at a time when major corporations, app developers and data miners appear to be collecting information about the online activities of millions of young Internet users without their parents’ awareness, children’s advocates say. Some sites and apps have also collected details like children’s photographs or locations of mobile devices; the concern is that the information could be used to identify or locate individual children.

These data-gathering practices are legal. But the development has so alarmed officials at the Federal Trade Commission that the agency is moving to overhaul rules that many experts say have not kept pace with the explosive growth of the Web and innovations like mobile apps. New rules are expected within weeks.

“Today, almost every child has a computer in his pocket and it’s that much harder for parents to monitor what their kids are doing online, who they are interacting with, and what information they are sharing,” says Mary K. Engle, associate director of the advertising practices division at the F.T.C. “The concern is that a lot of this may be going on without anybody’s knowledge.”

The proposed changes could greatly increase the need for children’s sites to obtain parental permission for some practices that are now popular — like using cookies to track users’ activities around the Web over time. Marketers argue that the rule should not be changed so extensively, lest it cause companies to reduce their offerings for children.

“Do we need a broad, wholesale change of the law?” says Mike Zaneis, the general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry association. “The answer is no. It is working very well.”

The current federal rule, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, requires operators of children’s Web sites to obtain parental consent before they collect personal information like phone numbers or physical addresses from children under 13. But rapid advances in technology have overtaken the rules, privacy advocates say.

Today, many brand-name companies and analytics firms collect, collate and analyze information about a wide range of consumer activities and traits. Some of those techniques could put children at risk, advocates say.

Under the F.T.C.’s proposals, some current online practices, like getting children under 13 to submit photos of themselves, would require parental consent.

Children who visit McDonald’s HappyMeal.com, for instance, can “get in the picture with Ronald McDonald” by uploading photos of themselves and combining them with images of the clown. Children may also “star in a music video” on the site by uploading photos or webcam images and having it graft their faces onto dancing cartoon bodies.

But according to children’s advocates, McDonald’s stored these images in directories that were publicly available. Anyone with an Internet connection could check out hundreds of photos of young children, a few of whom were pictured in pajamas in their bedrooms, advocates said.

In a related complaint to the F.T.C. last month, a coalition of advocacy groups accused McDonald’s and four other corporations of violating the 1998 law by collecting e-mail addresses without parental consent. HappyMeal.com, the complaint noted, invites children to share their creations on the site by providing the first names and e-mail addresses of their friends.

“When we tell parents about this they are appalled, because basically what it’s doing is going around the parents’ back and taking advantage of kids’ naïveté,” says Jennifer Harris, the director of marketing initiatives at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, a member of the coalition that filed the complaint. “It’s a very unfair and deceptive practice that we don’t think companies should be allowed to do.”

Danya Proud, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s, said in an e-mail that the company placed a “high importance” on protecting privacy, including children’s online privacy. She said that McDonald’s had blocked public access to several directories on the site.

Last year, the F.T.C. filed a complaint against W3 Innovations, a developer of popular iPhone and iPod Touch apps like Emily’s Dress Up, which invited children to design outfits and e-mail their comments to a blog. The agency said that the apps violated the children’s privacy rule by collecting the e-mail addresses of tens of thousands of children without their parents’ permission and encouraging those children to post personal information publicly. The company later settled the case, agreeing to pay a penalty of $50,000 and delete personal data it had collected about children.

It is often difficult to know what kind of data is being collected and shared. Industry trade groups say marketers do not knowingly track young children for advertising purposes. But a study last year of 54 Web sites popular with children, including Disney.go.com and Nick.com, found that many used tracking technologies extensively.

“I was surprised to find that pretty much all of the same technologies used to track adults are being used on kids’ Web sites,” said Richard M. Smith, an Internet security expert in Boston who conducted the study at the request of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group.

Using a software program called Ghostery, which detects and identifies tracking entities on Web sites, a New York Times reporter recently identified seven trackers on Nick.com — including Quantcast, an analytics company that, according to its own marketing material, helps Web sites “segment out specific audiences you want to sell” to advertisers.

Ghostery found 13 trackers on a Disney game page for kids, including AudienceScience, an analytics company that, according to that company’s site, “pioneered the concept of targeting and audience-based marketing.”

David Bittler, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, which runs Nick.com, says Viacom, the parent company, does not show targeted ads on Nick.com or other company sites for children under 13. But the sites and their analytics partners may collect data anonymously about users for purposes like improving content. Zenia Mucha, a spokeswoman for Disney, said the company does not show targeted ads to children and requires its ad partners to do the same.

Another popular children’s site, Webkinz, says openly that its advertising partners may aim at visitors with ads based on the collection of “anonymous data.” In its privacy policy, Webkinz describes the practice as “online advanced targeting.”

If the F.T.C. carries out its proposed changes, children’s Web sites would be required to obtain parents’ permission before tracking children around the Web for advertising purposes, even with anonymous customer codes.

Some parents say they are trying to teach their children basic online self-defense. “We don’t give out birth dates to get the free stuff,” said Patricia Tay-Weiss, a mother of two young children in Venice, Calif., who runs foreign language classes for elementary school students. “We are teaching our kids to ask, ‘What is the company getting from you and what are they going to do with that information?’ ”