Using Internet Services for Personal Information Management

The popularity and improvement in features provided by various Internet services are leading us to a situation where personal information items can be stored and managed online. Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to a set of activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute personal information for different purposes, including preserving personal and family information assets. The main purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions of university students of Internet services for managing their personal information; the type of information stored by them; how they organize, manage, access and control information distribution; and their concerns regarding privacy and security of their personal information. A pre-tested questionnaire was used for data collection and 212 students from two public universities took part in this study. It was found that 75% of the respondents were using Internet services for storing and managing some of their personal information items. The Internet services were mainly used by the students for storing email addresses and messages, personal text documents and photos. Only a small number of the students were using online storage for maintaining information about their appointments, telephone numbers, draft documents, audio and video recordings, and list of thing to be done. Over two-thirds of the respondents revealed that they only store nonsensitive personal information due to their concerns related to privacy and security of personal information. The paper also suggests certain measures for the improvement of personal information management skills of students and the general public.