Inspiration
Have you ever felt like the websites you visit are playing a game with you ? Flashy buttons scream " Buy Now ! ", urgency timers tick down, and " limited quantities " taunt you.
These are all tactics called dark patterns, designed to nudge you towards decisions you might not make otherwise.
But what if you could see through all the smoke and mirrors ? A tool that empowers you to navigate the online world with a new found awareness !, A browser extension that analyzes websites, highlighting areas where these persuasive tricks lurk ! Suddenly, the website's tricks become transparent and their power diminished.
This isn't just about protecting your wallet or yourself, It's also about reclaiming your agency online and the confidence of knowing when a website is trying to manipulate you.
You can make informed choices, free from the pressure of hidden tactics !!
Even better, this awareness can extend beyond shopping. Imagine spotting phishing emails in your inbox, flagged by the same tool ! Emails that mimic real companies, designed to steal your personal information. With a quick analysis, you can identify these attempts and avoid potential disaster !!
Building this tool is not just about technology, it's about empowering people. It's about shining a light on hidden manipulations that can cloud our online experience, Creating a web where the users are informed, aware and ultimately, in control.
What it does
Use cases
The user has the options to login or signup or use the extension anonymously.
The user can use it analyze websites for dark patterns and emails for phishing scams, by using the appropriate buttons on the extension's popup, at their discretion.
Dark Pattern Detector
Whenever the user visits a webpage, they can click on the "Analyze Dark Patterns" button which captures the screenshot of the webpage and uses Gemini Pro Vision API to analyze the website's screenshot.
We prefer to take a screenshot, as web scraping or other similar approaches fail to analyze images that could add to dark patterns like banners, and the spatial and positional aspects of elements on the webpage that contribute to the social engineering.
The Output of the API response is then displayed on the side of screen as a popup, so as to not interrupt the user's interaction with the website.
The response gives a highlight of all the instances of dark patterns on the screen while also giving a detailed explanation on the same, if the user wishes to read.
The response is classified into major and minor dark patterns, with label of what type of dark pattern each instance is.
Phishing scam detector
The user can use the phishing scam detector to analyze their emails in their inbox, for phishing and other malicious instances.
The user can choose if they wish to analyze an email in their inbox. If so, they can press the "Analyze Email" Button, which extracts the contents of the email and sends it to Gemini AI through an API call, to analyze the same, for phishing and other malicious intents.
The output response is displayed as a popup on the side.
Script attack protection
The extension constantly monitors as you browse through your emails, for unknown scripts injected into the email.
If it finds an instance of the same, It prevents the scripts from running and moves the email to a folder called "quarantine".
How we built it
We built the extension using react
The script attack detection is a python script, which uses the Gmail API to test of scripts in all emails in the inbox that are unread. The script runs on azure functions.
Challenges we ran into
Sending what the user is seeing/Screenshot of the user's view to Gemini AI
Reading the Email body and other details and sending it to Gemini AI
Implementing the Script attack protection
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The script attack protection and the quarantine feature
Dark Pattern detection and highlights
Phishing scam detection
What we learned
Usage of Gemini API
Building a Browser extension
DOM Parsing & Manipulation
How script attacks works and how to protect against them
What's next for Argus
A better and more pleasing UI
User Analytics
Highlighting dark patterns and phishing instances on the webpage directly
Better security
Improved Script attack protection with specialized algorithms for the same
Filtering the API response further to improve the output given to the user
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