Android :: Accessing Shared Preferences In Services And Non Activities

I have some shared preferences (user_id, email) that I want to access from services and classes that are not subclassed from Activity. I have been trying to implement this today and keep hitting roadblocks. In particular, when I try to access getSharedPreferences, I get a null pointer exception. My code is posted below. My goal here is to allow read access the shared preferences to objects and (potentially) services that aren't going to be directly exposed to the user.

<snip> public class MyPrefs extends Service {
public static final String PREFS_NAME = "MyPrefs";
private int user_id;
private String user_email;
private String user_password;
private Editor editor = null;
private SharedPreferences settings = null;
public MyPrefs () {
settings = this.getSharedPreferences(PREFS_NAME, Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
}
</snip>
this.getSharedPreferences line causes a null pointer exception.