Managing Personal Information

Alan F. Smeaton

Abstract: There is an increasing awareness of the potential that our own self-gathered personal information has for our wellness and our health. This is partly because of our increasing awareness of what others – the major internet companies mainly – have been able to do with the personal information that they gather about us. The biggest hurdle to us using and usefully exploiting our own self-gathered personal data are the applications to support that. In this paper we highlight both the potential and the challenges associated with more widespread use of our own personal data by ourselves and we point at ways in which we believe this might happen. We use the work done in lifelogging and the annual Lifelog Search Challenge as an indicator of what we can do with our own data. We review the small number of existing systems which do allow aggregation of our own personal information and show how the use of large language models could make the management of our personal data more straightforward.