Beyond Concern: Governance Assurance and Perceived Usefulness as Correlates of Willingness to Adopt the Social Internet of Things (SIoT)

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) extends conventional IoT by allowing devices to form social relationships that support service discovery and interaction, raising questions about societal acceptance that technical research addresses only indirectly. This study examines awareness, application-specific acceptance, ethical and privacy concerns, governance expectations, and willingness to adopt SIoT through a cross-sectional survey of 204 respondents. Ethical concern (81.9%; 95% Wilson CI: 76.0–86.5%) and privacy concern (83.3%; 95% Wilson CI: 77.6–87.8%) are widely reported, and acceptance varies by application, with safety- and care-oriented uses accepted more often than commercial uses. An ordinal logistic regression indicates that governance comfort (odds ratio [OR] 2.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.48–3.17, p<0.001) and perceived usefulness (OR 1.69, 95% CI 1.07–2.65, p=0.023) are independently associated with willingness to adopt SIoT, while ethical and privacy concern are not statistically significant after adjustment for the other model predictors. Exploratory mediation analysis indicates an indirect association between ethical concern and willingness to adopt SIoT through perceived usefulness (indirect effect =−.099, 95% bootstrap CI: [−.180,−.014]); this analysis does not establish causality. These findings are interpreted through a privacy calculus perspective and translated into a conceptual governance framework connecting societal expectations to existing SIoT technical mechanisms. Overall, willingness to adopt SIoT is associated with governance comfort and perceived usefulness, whereas ethical and privacy concerns do not show statistically significant independent associations in the multivariable model.