JenniCam

JenniCam was a popular website whose main feature was several webcams that allowed Internet users to observe the life of a young woman, Jennifer Ringley.

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In April of 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College, Ms. Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room, and provided images from that cam on a webpage. The webpage would automatically refresh every three minutes with the most recent picture from the camera. Anyone with Internet access could observe Ringley as she went about her daily life. JenniCam was one of the first web sites that continuously and voluntarily surveyed a private life.

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Ringley states that the site was an attempt to document her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior.

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Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years. After she graduated from Dickinson, the site moved with her to Washington, D.C. and later to Sacramento, California. After leaving the college dorm, she moved to housing that consisted of more than one room, so she added webcams to cover the additional living space. Eventually, she started to charge for access to her site. At the height of her popularity, more than a million people watched JenniCam.org daily.

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Aside from her net-celebrity status as the one of the first persons to use a webcam in the manner described here, she also was known for a scandal in which she had sexual intercourse with Dex, the fiance of her friend Courtney. Courtney found out about Dex's infidelity by viewing the images on the JenniCam.org website. Dex later moved in with Ringley.

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The site was closed permanently on December 31, 2003. One possible reason Ringley shut down her site was that PayPal had dropped her as a customer because her website included full-frontal nudity.

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Website: A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of Web pages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible generally via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. The pages of a website will be accessed from a common r...

Webcam: A webcam is a video capture device connected to a computer or computer network, often using a USB port or, if connected to a network, ethernet or Wi-Fi....

Internet: This article is about the Internet, the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term informally used to describe any set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking....