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Privacy is a sensitive issue in business because it involves how a platform uses consumer personal data. In terms of consumer rights, personal information needs to be protected in the privacy policy (PP). This study describes several aspects of the PP that consumers need to pay attention to, especially points prone to misuse of personal information.

This research used a taxonomy of consumer privacy concerns in e-commerce to reveal general and specific privacy concerns. The privacy calculus theory was also applied to explore consumer rationalization using (1) consumer knowledge about PP, (2) subjective perception, and (3) proximity to the PP features. Furthermore, the netnographic approach was used to combine the interrelation between technology and social construction. A sample of 378 young consumers in several major cities in Indonesia participated online and offline. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to gain more in-depth comprehension.

The results showed that most young consumers have sufficient basic knowledge of the important points of PP. Furthermore, they tend not to read the PP because it is long and cumbersome, and therefore do not wish to expend much cognitive effort on it.

This study provides several results that can be utilized by policymakers or e-commerce companies to pay more attention to PPs for young groups. In addition, e-commerce companies can increase the knowledge of the privacy situation of Internet users in general.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0740

This study aims to explore and extend the consumer–brand relationship literature by integrating the relatively new construct of brand coolness with a growing body of work on gratitude. Specifically, gratitude is explored alongside emotional brand attachment as an additional mechanism affecting the relationship between cool brands and the loyalty outcome of repurchase intention. Consumption context is examined as a boundary condition to the effect of gratitude.

Data was collected from an online survey of a Qualtrics panel of 356 US consumers. A moderated mediation model is used to explain the effects of brand coolness on repurchase intention via emotional brand attachment and brand gratitude in the moderating presence of consumption context.

Brand coolness significantly increases repurchase intention. Furthermore, emotional brand attachment and brand gratitude are established as parallel mediators of the relationship between brand coolness and repurchase intention, with brand gratitude exhibiting a significantly stronger mediated effect. The impact of brand coolness on brand gratitude is moderated by social visibility, with publicly consumed cool brands stimulating greater brand gratitude than their privately consumed counterparts.

Brand gratitude is shown to influence repurchase intention independent of the impact exerted by consumers’ emotional brand attachment. Cognitive appraisal theory is used to distinguish brand gratitude from other mediators studied in consumer–brand relationships. Findings establish the moderating influence of the social visibility of the brand on the relationship between brand coolness and gratitude.

Much has been speculated about the role that Generation Z will play in achieving more sustainable development. The tourism sector gains a special role in this discussion. On the one hand, tourism, due to its growing importance, has had a significant impact on environmental sustainability. On the other hand, Generation Z will be the largest group of travellers ever in the future. In this context, the objective of the present study is to explore the interest of young Portuguese generation Z in sustainable development goals (SDGs), tourism sustainability (TS) and their pro-environmental habits and how these categories influence the choice of sustainable tourism destination.

An online questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 305 young Portuguese. The quantitative analysis was performed with the application of the partial least square (PLS) model.

Overall, the authors found that despite our respondents showing an interest in the SDGs the same interest is not true for tourism. Although most respondents are concerned about choosing a sustainable destination, they do not care about keeping destinations sustainable, nor do they have pro-environmental habits.

This study presents the first evidence of the attitudes, beliefs and pro-environmental habits of Portuguese Gen Zers and their potential contribution to TS.

Scams are indeed malicious attempts to influence people and can take many forms, including online scams. With the increasing availability of technology, scammers have more tools at their disposal to create convincing and sophisticated communications that appear to come from legitimate sources, such as emails, text messages or social media posts. These scams can be designed to trick individuals into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware or ransomware or providing sensitive information such as login information, financial information or personal details. Scammers often use social engineering techniques to persuade their targets to take specific actions, such as creating a sense of urgency, offering a reward or prize or posing as a trusted authority. These tactics can be highly effective, particularly if the target is unaware of the warning signs of a scam or is unfamiliar with how to protect themselves from online fraud. This paper aims to explore the extent and nature of this problem and evokes the concern that the general public is vulnerable and susceptible to scams if they are not resilient and aware. This paper also explores why victims fall for online scams and uncovers preventive measures to enable a direction in tacitly strategizing ways to create more impactful and effective awareness campaigns.

This study explores these aspects through a holistic qualitative approach. Using in-depth interview techniques with six victims, six non-victims, four law enforcement officers, four scammers and seven stakeholders from various agencies such as banks, telecommunication agencies and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission involved in combating the issue of scams.

The findings generally revealed that participants who were victims of scams felt Malaysians were susceptible to scams, easily fooled and had a nonchalant attitude. Most participants also highlighted that public safety is important for ensuring a high quality of life for citizens that should work closely between the government and non-government agencies, including effective law enforcement and crime prevention strategies.

The uniqueness of this study is the feedback from scammers themselves and their input towards authority and victims. Overall, the respondents provide their views drawing strength from the ever-changing technological background as well as the susceptibility of security features and vulnerability of human engagement.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on society and will continue to be a subject of study for researchers in the years to come. Businesses have implemented technologies that reduce reliance on physical currencies, such as e-commerce sites and contactless payments. This study aims to examine the users’ attitudes and behaviors toward mobile payments. The focus is on identifying the most effective techniques and approaches that businesses can use to encourage user adoption of mobile payments.

This study uses survey data from 396 active mobile payment users across the mid-west region of the USA to test the proposed hypothesis. The snowball sampling approach is used to sample the participants for the data collection. This study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the ten hypotheses proposed in this study.

This study finds that organizational commitment and privacy customization can significantly overcome users’ protective attitudes toward mobile payments during the pandemic. In addition, providing users with privacy customization options can significantly encourage self-disclosure, which is crucial for transaction authentication and fraud detection.

Envisioned in the backdrop of the COVID pandemic, this is one of the earliest studies investigating the role of privacy customization, self-disclosure and organizational commitment on mobile payment adoption.

Although cloud storage services can bring users valuable convenience, they can be technically complex and intrinsically insecure. Therefore, this research explores the concerns of academic users regarding cloud security and technical issues and how such problems may influence their continuous use in daily life.

This qualitative study used a semi-structured interview approach comprising six main open-ended questions to explore the information security and technical issues for the continuous use of cloud storage services by 20 undergraduate students in Hong Kong.

The analysis revealed cloud storage service users' major security and technical concerns, particularly synchronization and backup issues, were the most significant technical barrier to the continuing personal use of cloud storage services.

Existing literature has focused on how cloud computing services could bring benefits and security and privacy-related risks to organizations rather than security and technical issues of personal use, especially in the Asian academic context.

Many universities implemented institutional social networking apps as an alternative to in-person social experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to explore previously identified factors that influenced intentions to form collective actions, also known as we-intentions, on such social networking apps and their influence on student satisfaction with the app artifact.

Students from across a large university were invited to participate in a survey. Responses from 915 students who reported using the app were analyzed using a maximum likelihood covariance-based structural equation model. Analysis was conducted using the R programming language's psych, lavaan, and semTools packages.

The authors found that we-intentions are positively associated with recent app use and with student satisfaction with the app. Group norms were found to significantly influence the formation of we-intentions, while social identity is positively associated with both we-intentions and satisfaction.

The paper provides evidence that past research generalizes to the context of university mobile social networks and identifies a relationship between we-intentions and satisfaction in this context. It also provides practical insight into factors that influence we-intentions, and subsequently students' online education experience, in the context of a university's institutional mobile social network.

This review aims to summarize the extent to which sustainability dimensions are covered in the selected qualitative literature, the theoretical and ontological underpinnings that have informed sustainability research and the qualitative methodologies used in that literature.

This study uses a systematic review to examine prior empirical studies in sustainability reporting between 2000 and 2021.

This review contributes to sustainability research by identifying unexplored and underexplored areas for future studies, such as Indigenous people’s rights, employee health and safety practice, product responsibility, gender and leadership diversity. Institutional and stakeholder theories are widely used in the selected literature, whereas moral legitimacy remains underexplored. The authors suggest that ethnographic and historical research will increase the richness of academic research findings on sustainability reporting.

This review is limited to qualitative studies only because its richness allows researchers to apply various methodological and theoretical approaches to understand engagement in sustainability reporting practice.

This review follows a novel approach of bringing the selected studies’ scopes, theories and methodologies together. This approach permits researchers to formulate a research question coherently using a logical framework for a research problem.

Against the background of the I50 paradigm, this paper queries in what ways blockchain and blockchain-based applications deployed in the smart city context facilitate the integration of the I50 paradigm in smart urban contexts.

A mixed methods approach is applied. First, by means of desk research and thematic literature review, a conceptual model integrating the I50 paradigm, smart city and blockchain-based solutions is built. Second, science mapping bibliometric analysis (SciMat) based on keywords’ co-occurrence is applied to a sample of 491 research articles to identify key domains of blockchain-based applications’ use in smart city. Third, a semi-systematic literature review complements insights gained through SciMat. Fourth, the findings are interpreted through the precepts of the conceptual model devised earlier.

The key blockchain-based applications in smart cities pertain to two domains, i.e. the foundational, service facilitation-oriented domain, including security (and safety), networks, computing, resource management and the service delivery-oriented domain, including mobility, energy and healthcare. Blockchain serves as the key building block for applications developed to deliver functions specific to each of the thus identified domains. A substantial layering of blockchain-based tools and applications is necessary to advance from the less to the more complex functional domains of the smart city.

At the conceptual level, the intricacies of the (making of the) I50 paradigm are discussed and a case for I50 – smart city – blockchain nexus is made. Easton’s input–output model as well as constructivism is referenced. At the empirical level, the key major domains of blockchain-based applications are discussed; those that bear the prospect of integrating the I50 paradigm in the smart city are highlighted. At the methodological level, a strategic move is made aimed at restoring the literature review’s role as subservient to the key line of exploration, to justify and ultimately support it, rather than to showcase the literature review as the ultimate purpose for itself.

Federation analytics approaches are a present area of study that has already progressed beyond the analysis of metrics and counts. It is possible to acquire aggregated information about on-device data by training machine learning models using federated learning techniques without any of the raw data ever having to leave the devices in the issue. Web browser forensics research has been focused on individual Web browsers or architectural analysis of specific log files rather than on broad topics. This paper aims to propose major tools used for Web browser analysis.

Each kind of Web browser has its own unique set of features. This allows the user to choose their preferred browsers or to check out many browsers at once. If a forensic examiner has access to just one Web browser's log files, he/she makes it difficult to determine which sites a person has visited. The agent must thus be capable of analyzing all currently available Web browsers on a single workstation and doing an integrated study of various Web browsers.

Federated learning has emerged as a training paradigm in such settings. Web browser forensics research in general has focused on certain browsers or the computational modeling of specific log files. Internet users engage in a wide range of activities using an internet browser, such as searching for information and sending e-mails.

It is also essential that the investigator have access to user activity when conducting an inquiry. This data, which may be used to assess information retrieval activities, is very critical. In this paper, the authors purposed a major tool used for Web browser analysis. This study's proposed algorithm is capable of protecting data privacy effectively in real-world experiments.