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Internet technology has flourished in India keeping pace with other developing countries. In keeping pace with this advancement, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is also spreading in India. Government of India (GOI) has realised IoT's business prospect and published draft policy on IoT in 2015. To achieve a better result, the prospective users are required to be kept aware regarding the prospect of IoT and for this, social media is expected to play a pivotal role. Social media can highlight advantages of IoT and in turn, these advantages would be made known to other potential users through Word of Month (WOM). This would bring in projection of a new business paradigm as contemplated by GOI. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting actual use of IoT by the potential users of India and to develop a conceptual model. The model has been verified through survey with inputs from 208 participants identified from three metropolitan cities of India. The responses have been quantified through 5-Point Likert scale. The result shows the implication that social media and WOM almost equally influence Indians to use IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security and privacy policies address consumer concerns related to security and privacy in e-commerce websites. As these policies represent only the vendor’s perspective, often there exists a mismatch between the stated and desired policy. Based on transaction cost theory, we speculate that business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce customers use their transaction cost savings in order to obtain varying levels of security and privacy. These differences are bound to be reflected in the security and privacy policies of e-commerce companies. Therefore, in this paper, we perform a comparative content analysis of the security and privacy policies in B2C and B2B e-commerce. Results show that B2B vendors are more concerned about security than their B2C counterparts, while B2C vendors are anxious about intimacy and restriction privacy. Our findings have important implications for e-commerce consumers and vendors as individual and corporate consumers have varying concerns while transacting online. Individual consumers are concerned about maintaining security and intimacy privacy, whereas corporate users are anxious about regulatory issues. Therefore, B2C vendors should incorporate stringent measures dedicated to confidentiality and protection of consumer data as well as enhance intimacy privacy in their security policies, while their B2B counterparts should focus on enhancing restriction privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses the papers in the issue addressing website quality and usability.