Do Desperate Students Trade Their Privacy for a Hope? - An Evidence of the Privacy Settings Influence on the User Performance

Maintaining people's privacy should be the top priority not only in the context of Information Systems (IS) design. Sometimes, however, certain level of privacy can be traded for a gain in another IS quality or aspect. We present a real world example of IS with user maintained level of privacy and an evidence of its usage, correlated with users' performance. Recent students' and applicants' privacy settings in an educational IS were examined. According to our findings, a part of students voluntarily disclose their presence in the courses enrolled and on the examination dates registered. Surprisingly, the study results of the disclosed students are worse then the results of undisclosed ones. In the correspondence with our thesis, disclosed applicants have better entrance exam results.