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Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page F07
After seven years, it looks like former Washington resident Jennifer Ringley
is finally turning off the webcams. Ringley, more famous as the woman behind Jennicam (www.jennicam.org), became an Internet
curiosity and a quasi-celebrity in the early days of the Web by putting up
cameras around her apartment and letting anyone with an Internet connection tune
in at any hour for a $15 annual subscription. An announcement on Ringley's site last week said that the Jennicam show will
close at the end of the year. But so far, the woman who shared everything --
yes, everything -- about her daily life has not revealed at her site why she's
pulling the shutters. She did not respond to an e-mail sent midafternoon Friday.
Online payment service PayPal could be one culprit. In October, Ringley
forwarded some of her subscribers an e-mail from PayPal telling her the company
had closed her account because its policy prohibits "the sale of items for
mature audiences" (patient viewers have been able to catch the redhead in the
altogether). "They've disabled my account so I'm not able to accept subscriptions," she
wrote in the e-mail. "I guess I've given up." A spokeswoman for PayPal confirmed
that the company had closed her account because of the presence of nudity on the
site. Canadian Jennicam fan Paul Brown told The Post in an e-mail Friday that he
was sad to see Jennicam close. "In a sense I'd like to have maintained the surveillance for the rest of her
life. . . . as a sociological experiment and a life-narrative art project," he
said. "I wish we'd been able to see it out." At the peak of Jennicam's popularity, around the turn of the millennium,
Ringley told The Post that her site got an average of 100 million visitors a
week.
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