I Want My App That Way: Reclaiming Sovereignty Over Personal Devices
This addresses the issue of user sovereignty and safety in mobile apps for non-expert users, representing a novel approach in a domain with no established solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of dark patterns in mobile apps, which exploit user cognitive biases and cause harm, by introducing GreaseDroid, a community-driven framework that allows non-expert users to selectively disable these patterns in apps.
Dark patterns in mobile apps take advantage of cognitive biases of end-users and can have detrimental effects on people's lives. Despite growing research in identifying remedies for dark patterns and established solutions for desktop browsers, there exists no established methodology to reduce dark patterns in mobile apps. Our work introduces GreaseDroid, a community-driven app modification framework enabling non-expert users to disable dark patterns in apps selectively.