As of two years ago, an eleven-year-old member of the Girl Scouts who has sent E-mails, studied the art of online commenting, and been schooled in “oops! moments” on the Internet may be eligible to earn a badge in “Netiquette.” The patch is diamond-shaped, with four colored stripes, and stitched with two opposing faces that look like this ; ) and this -:, as if the patch were a Web-ified comedy-tragedy mask. That dual impression has guided the Girl Scouts as they inch toward the Internet with timid steps. Now the organization is expanding its digital presence with the release of a new Girl Scout Cookie Locator mobile app, which uses G.P.S. to track down nearby Thin Mints. So far, more than eighty-eight thousand people have signed up.

In the past, the Girl Scouts have been especially mindful of the risks involved in leading a charge of young girls into the virtual world—with mothers’ worry and deference to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act—perhaps to the point of excess. In 2009, an eight-year-old tried to sell cookies directly on the Web by posting a YouTube video, but Girl Scouts officials told her to take it down. A spokesperson, Michelle Tompkins, told Newsweek at the time, “Girl Scouts of the USA is not shunning the Internet… though we still have to figure out how to do this.”

The other day, I asked Tompkins about the new app. “Cookie buyers are using it the most,” she told me. “It isn’t necessarily Girl Scout members, it’s Girl Scout buyers and aficionados.” The girls themselves, she explained, didn’t develop the app, and do not manage it. They can link to it. Amanda Hamaker, manager of product sales for the Girl Scouts, said that, whereas a few years ago, their basic cookie locator Web site focussed on G.P.S., allowing customers to search for cookies in their Zip Code, it did not detail anything else about the scouts or their goods. “Adding the booth sale information has really opened up the doors for girls to be able to market themselves,” she said. Her office distributes guidelines for using social media, she explained, so “a girl who is thirteen years or older can tell her friends, ‘I’m selling Girl Scout cookies. D.M. me.’ ”

The app was upgraded this year, after débuts on iPhone and Android devices, which had less than a third as many registrants as the current version. Each incarnation has provided essentially the same service: a way to search for the cookie sale nearest to you. The new app also has descriptions of every variety—the Do-si-dos peanut butter sandwiches, the caramel Samoas, the Thank U Berry Munch—darling names that are undercut by austere instructions, written in the voice of a precocious scout: “We know we’re cute, but selling cookies is real. We’re learning how to run a business. We want you to buy cookies because you want them and respect what we’re learning, not because of our nice haircut or uniform.”

The seven-hundred-and-ninety-million-dollar cookie program is intended to teach girls “The 5 Skills” (goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics), which the organization hasn’t deemed to be achievable on the Web. Their official policy states: “Buying Girl Scout cookies is more than just handing over money for a box. It’s about the skills and learning a girl gains from interacting directly with you. It’s about the experience of running her own cookie business and working with others. It’s the reason we don’t sell cookies online.”

“It could just be automated, and the girl goes clicking through,” said Jo Imeson, who helps run the Girl Scouts’ digital program. “We do not want that. We are not building an e-commerce program for selling cookies.”

They are, however, in the process of developing a more robust digital platform. “We are doing research about the appropriate way to integrate technology into the Girl Scout cookie sale,” Hamaker said. The organization is looking into the legal and financial implications of allowing the scouts to swipe for payment using credit-card dongles. “We’ve talked to girls about what they want to do, if they are more likely, for instance, to engage in an online cookie channel,” and in surveying their members, Hamaker said, “We definitely heard from the older girls in particular that they were interested in an online channel,” although, she added, “the littler girls still really wanted the opportunity to go door to door.”

Three years ago, the Girl Scouts hosted a three-day gathering with its local councils and bakers to discuss how to bring technology to the forefront of their cookie business. “What it all boiled down to was being able to walk away with a vigorous program for girls that teaches economy skills, in terms of an e-commerce environment; a data-management platform that could be streamlined; transaction management—whether that’s online, or whether she’s out in the world, it doesn’t have to be a cash economy; and facilitating an online sale,” Hamaker said. “At first we thought we had to attack those things separately, and then we realized that all of these things fall under the e-cookie umbrella.”

From this emerged an “e-cookie initiative.” It isn’t far along in development, Imeson said, but when it’s ready, “e-cookie is going to transform the way girls sell cookies, taking the whole experience into the digital age.” What that means, exactly, remains unclear. So far e-cookie has set the organization off on a course of research—how to incorporate “the skills,” protect the girls’ privacy, manage the revenue—but no concrete plans are in place.

In the meantime, the app itself is clever and easy to use, but has little to do with the scouts themselves—a conundrum not unfamiliar to the colleagues of their parents, who have, on occasion, passed cookie order forms around the office to boost their daughters’ sales records. One afternoon, after school let out, I followed the app to the nearest pop-up shop, at the Girl Scouts’ Manhattan Council on West Twenty-third Street. When the elevator opened at the sixth floor, a man seated at the receptionist desk pointed to my right. “Down the hall!” I walked past rows of grownups and entered a large room where two women were standing behind a banquet table, taking orders and handling the cash. “No scouts today?” I asked one of them. “None today,” she said. “Two boxes? Eight dollars.”

Photograph of members of Eastern Massachusetts Girl Scout Troop 71911 selling cookies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty.