1 Do Privacy Controls Influence Content Generation and Sharing Patterns of Online Social Network Users? A Natural Experiment Huseyin Cavusoglu University of Texas at Dallas huseyin@utdallas.edu Tuan Phan National University of Singapore phantq@comp.nus.edu.sg Hasan Cavusoglu University of British Columbia hasan.cavusoglu@sauder.ubc.ca Introduction In the age of social media, online social networks (OSNs), such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, are indispensable for the majority of Internet users. To some, OSNs are as essential to their lives as electricity. These platforms enable OSN users to share content including status updates, pictures videos, comments, tags, and messages, with other people. Although most OSNs have been frequently criticized by privacy groups for the lack of attention to and care for privacy of their users, these platforms have continued to make inroads to new user bases. Today, OSNs are one of the fastest growing and most visited sites on the Internet. Facebook, the largest OSN, has reached 1 billion active users in September 2012 (Fowler 2012). Despite the popularity of OSNs among Internet users, these platforms still suffer from a lack of a proven business model. Advertising is the main, and in most cases the only, source of revenue as users sign up for these services for free. Yet, OSNs seem far behind in capitalizing on their large user bases for advertising revenues compared to other web businesses. For instance, Facebook generated around $4 billion revenue last year, which is much less than the nearly $38 billion that Google earned from an equally large audience (Fowler 2012). While Google and Yahoo make about $88 from each user who uses its search engine, Facebook makes around $15 from each user (Fowler 2012). The main advantage of OSNs over other web businesses, such as search engines, is their ability to access people and their networks of friends directly. Instead of tracking people’s web activities and running complex data analytics tools to create user profiles in order to predict user interests, OSNs effortlessly gain insights into the lives of people through the content users voluntarily generate on their sites. This unique aspect creates a very powerful advertising tool not only in matching people with advertisers, but also in spreading the message across the network of friends, thereby facilitating social influence (Aral and Walker 2011). However, this opportunity extensively hinges on OSN