Plan at G-20 Is to Tighten Global Rules on Taxes

They are expected on Friday to agree to enact new tax laws that would limit the ability of multinational corporations like Apple and Starbucks to legally avoid paying taxes by operating subsidiaries in certain countries.

The practice came to the fore during the global recession as national coffers were strained and leaders looked for new sources of revenue. The recent positive economic news has not damped that desire or relieved the pressure to crack down.

In the United States, economic news has pointed to continued growth. On Friday, the Labor Department is expected to issue a healthy jobs report with 180,000 jobs created in August. It is the last set of economic data the government will release before the Federal Reserve meets to consider tightening monetary policy and raising interest rates in the United States.

On Thursday, the Institute for Supply Management issued its closely watched report, which said service companies were hiring more, and fewer people are applying for unemployment benefits. Auto sales are up sharply.

Recent economic reports from Britain, France, Germany and other countries in Europe’s northern tier have also been optimistic, although central bankers there remain cautious.

If the United States government reports that even more jobs were created, analysts expect that the 10-year Treasury note, which rose to 3 percent on Thursday, will rise further.

Currencies in many of the developing economies that benefited from the expansionist policies of the Federal Reserve have recently been falling sharply against the dollar as the Fed signaled its plans to tighten, and as money flows have reversed. Growth in many of the so-called BRICS economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — that had buoyed global growth have slowed as momentum shifts to the United States, Japan and northern Europe.

The heads of state have two days of meetings and will issue a communiqué on Friday that is expected to address the tax overhaul and other questions of economic policy.

Though the meeting is overshadowed by the crisis in Syria, and deep divisions between nations over possible American military action there, the heads of state are still expected to collectively endorse an economic policy statement that will encourage the continuing fiscal stimulus, or government spending, to help the recovery.

Germany, in the driver’s seat of European economic policy, had objected but appeared ready to acquiesce to a statement endorsing fiscal stimulus at a ministerial-level meeting in July in Moscow.

That meeting also encouraged governments to carefully coordinate tapering off monetary stimulus programs like the Federal Reserve’s so-called quantitative easing. The end of cheap credit has curbed growth in emerging markets as investors bring money back to the United States to take advantage of rising interest rates.

On Thursday, Russia’s deputy minister of finance, Sergei A. Storchak, said the leaders were set to endorse a similarly worded statement on Friday.

“It’s not going to be more than the agreements that were reached in Moscow,” Mr. Storchak told Reuters at the summit meeting, being held in the restored Czarist-era Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg.

In a reflection of the depth of concern about currency outflows caused by rising interest rates in the United States — meaning investors can obtain similar returns in emerging markets at far lower risk — the BRICS nations announced an intention to create a collective fund of $100 billion to defend their weakening local currencies. It was unclear when it would be operating and able to intervene in currency trading.

The effort at tax reform, if enacted widely, would squeeze more money from multinational corporations and shift a portion of the global tax burden from individuals and small businesses to large corporations. The proposal is for countries to better coordinate tax treaties to close loopholes that multinational corporations exploit by registering in tax havens like Delaware or the Cayman Islands. Another tactic of concern is shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and costs to high-tax ones.

In one widely cited example, Starbucks last year paid no corporate tax in Britain despite generating sales of nearly $630 million from more than 700 stores in that country. The company volunteered to pay more in coming years. Apple, despite being the most profitable American technology company, avoided billions in taxes in the United States and around the world through a web of complex subsidiaries.

Even with the high-level agreement, it will take years to put in place, and companies that benefit and have structured their business to comply with the laws in place today are all but certain to lobby to retain these advantages. The G-20 governments endorsed a draft of the tax agreement in Moscow in July.

The reform would encourage nations to adopt new standardized tax treaties, to replace the web of thousands of such agreements that exists now.

Russia is hosting the G-20 for the first time since the group was formed in 1999 and began discussing strategies for priming the global economy.

Mr. Storchak, the deputy finance minister in Russia, said in an interview before the opening meeting on Thursday that Russia had asked all governments to explain their spending plans for the years ahead, and that most had complied and agreed to release the results of this survey during the forum.

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?’ ”