Summer camps are getting unwanted publicity on the interweb, according to an article in the New York Times.
Summer camp directors have a new scourge, and it is not mosquitoes or impetigo. It is the Internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, where young people often post personal or revealing information.
Camps say they are increasingly concerned about being identified in photographs or comments on these sites, even innocuously. They worry about online predators tracking children to camp and about their image being tarnished by inappropriate Internet juxtapositions — a mention, say, of the camp on a site that also has crude language or sexually suggestive pictures.
“One camp director called me in a panic,” said Christopher Thurber, a psychologist who advises camps. “She had Googled her camp’s name and linked to a soft-core porn site where she found pictures of her campers in their bathing suits. And what’s in the background? The camp banner.”
Maybe we shoud just make the interweb an adult-only facility. We could enter every newborn baby’s date of birth in a database, and 21 years later send out a log in.