Do Desperate Students Trade their Privacy for a Hope? An Evidence of the Privacy Settings Influence on the User Performance Tomáš Obšívač 1 , Hana Bydžovská 1 and Michal Brandejs 1 1 Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Keywords information privacy• social translucence• educational information system• student performance• Abstract Maintaining people’s privacy should be the top priority. Sometimes certain• level of privacy can be traded for a gain in another IS aspect. Some students voluntarily disclose their presence in the courses enrolled and• on the examination dates registered. The disclosed students study results are worse than the results of the undis-• closed ones. Disclosed applicants have better entrance exam results. A real world example of IS with user maintained level of privacy and a non-USA centric evidence of its usage, correlated with users’ performance, missing by the research community. [1] References [1] Bélanger, F., & Crossler, R. E., 2011. Privacy in the digital age: a review of information privacy research in information systems. In MIS Quarterly, Society for Information Management and The Management IS Research Center Minneapolis, MN, USA, Volume 35, Issue 4. ISSN 0276-7783. [2] Erickson, T., & Kellogg, W. A., 2000. Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Volume 7, Issue 1, Pages 59–83. [3] Bayer, J., Bydžovská, H., Géryk, J., Obšívač, T., & Popelínský, L., 2012. Predicting drop-out from social behaviour of students. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2012). Chania, Greece. Pages 103–109. ISBN 978-1-74210-276-4. Basic information privacy settings: are users allowed to see each other’s existence, presence and activity? Such visibility is an important determinant of harm to privacy. Meanwhile, an essential social software feature, the social translucence, advised for systems supporting communication and collaboration among large groups of people, includes visibility of participants and their activities to one another. [2] → Research question: Does lowered privacy pay off? Acknowledgements We would like to thank all colleagues of IS MU development team for the support. This work has been partially supported by Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. Contact: surname@fi.muni.cz Course Enrollment Disclosure Courses with disclosed students (average 9,600 per semester) Disclosed Students Undisclosed Students Percentage Difference Spring 2011 1.92 1.77 8.1% Autumn 2011 1.91 1.82 4.8% Spring 2012 1.90 1.78 6.5% Autumn 2012 1.96 1.80 8.5% Spring 2013 1.92 1.76 8.7% Gained Grades Averages (AG) Courses With Disclose Courses w/o Disclose Percentage Difference Spring 2011 1.98 1.72 14.1% Autumn 2011 2.16 1.97 9.2% Spring 2012 2.18 1.95 11.1% Autumn 2012 1.92 2.05 6.5% Spring 2013 2.02 1.92 5.1% Disclosed Students AG Students which disclose their course enroll-• ment have gained a slightly worse AG. The disclose took place at the courses with• worse AG assigned to disclosed students. Examination Date Registration Disclosure Exam dates with disclosed students (500 to 1,350 courses per semester) Disclosed Students Undisclosed Students Percentage Difference Spring 2011 2.15 1.77 19.4% Autumn 2011 2.06 1.82 12.4% Spring 2012 2.13 1.77 18.5% Autumn 2012 2.19 1.80 19.6% Spring 2013 2.21 1.75 23.2% Gained Grades Averages (AG) Courses With Disclose Courses w/o Disclose Percentage Difference Spring 2011 2.03 1.90 6.6% Autumn 2011 2.75 1.86 38.6% Spring 2012 2.70 1.84 37.9% Autumn 2012 2.37 1.80 27.3% Spring 2013 2.37 1.83 25.7% Disclosed Students AG Students which disclose their exam registra-• tion have gained notably worse AG. The disclose took place at the courses with• higher AG assigned to disclosed students. Application for Study at the University Disclosure Disclosed applicants (1,100 to 1,350 applicants every year) Disclosed Applicants Undisclosed Applicants Percentage Difference 2011 59.00 50.55 15.4% 2012 59.04 49.87 16.8% 2013 60.58 53.92 11.6% Entrance exam results (higher is better) Disclosed Applicants Undisclosed Applicants Percentage Difference 2011 47.15 35.83 27.3% 2012 48.27 32.85 38.0% 2013 47.55 33.85 33.7% The application success [%] Applicants which disclose their county of res-• idence have better entrance exam results. Disclosed applicants had greater probability• of application success. Discussion Disclosure options are the advanced• IS MU feature. It is not advertised. No evidence in the research results• to support the change from opt-in to opt-out visibility so far. There is an educational intention to• support acquaintance among stu- dents. Results vary according to the faculty• and corresponding style of study. Conclusions Students in need of help appear to• look for a classmate assistance. We have to prepare a student survey• to answer the research question. Disclosures, as a student characteris-• tics, can be used to increase a student performance prediction accuracy. [3] The future study should extend this• research in the area of subgroup dis- covery. 0% 20% 30% 40% 0% 5% 20% 0% 2% 4% Masaryk University Information System (IS MU) https://is.muni.cz/ Being developed since 1999, Web-based IS MU hosts numerous applications utilized for managing study-related records, e-learning tools and those facilitating communication inside the University. • Used by more than 30,000 users a day. • Key networking and communication tool. • 23% users with two-way friendship connections (156,000 friendships in total). • 680,000 course discussion boards posts a year (15 per user).