Mind-proofing Your Phone: Navigating the Digital Minefield with GreaseTerminator
This work addresses digital harms like distraction and hate speech for mobile users, presenting a tool for intervention development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interface-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of digital harms in the mobile ecosystem by introducing GreaseTerminator, a tool that enables researchers to develop, deploy, and test user interface interventions, demonstrating its ease of use and broad applicability in five case studies.
Digital harms are widespread in the mobile ecosystem. As these devices gain ever more prominence in our daily lives, so too increases the potential for malicious attacks against individuals. The last line of defense against a range of digital harms - including digital distraction, political polarisation through hate speech, and children being exposed to damaging material - is the user interface. This work introduces GreaseTerminator to enable researchers to develop, deploy, and test interventions against these harms with end-users. We demonstrate the ease of intervention development and deployment, as well as the broad range of harms potentially covered with GreaseTerminator in five in-depth case studies.