HabitLab

SUMMARY

HabitLab is an open-source research project from Stanford on helping users reduce their time online. It includes various tools like news feed blockers, comment hiders, and more. HabitLab will try out different tools and figure out what is most effective for you. Data on effectiveness will be recorded for research purposes. HOW IT WORKS Tell HabitLab which sites you want to spend less time on. We support all sites, including popular sites like Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Netflix. Each time you visit a site, we will intelligently choose an intervention (which use techniques such as hiding your news feed, hiding comments, pausing videos, showing notifications if you've been on a site too long, and more) to help you reduce your time on the site. If you don’t like an intervention, you can choose to disable it. HabitLab learns which interventions work best for you based on your browsing history and their past effectiveness, and uses this to more effectively help you reduce your time online. ABOUT HabitLab is an open-source project developed by the Stanford HCI Group. You can find source code at https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab PERMISSIONS Chrome will ask you for the following permissions when you install. Here’s how we use them: * tabs: We use this for showing productivity interventions such as showing timers, removing feeds, pausing video auto-play, etc (by using content scripts to modify sites) and monitoring time spent on sites (by detecting when tabs are opened and closed) * webNavigation: We use this for detecting page navigations within a tab - such as clicking on a new video in Youtube - so we know when the productivity intervention needs to be updated * storage: We use this for storing logs of how long the user has spent on each site and how effective interventions have been for the user. This is used for: 1) visualizing intervention effectiveness to users in the productivity dashboard, and 2) personalizing interventions to users by selecting those that have been most effective for that user * history: We use the browsing history to determine what the user's most frequently sites are at the time of install, so we can show those to them as sites they want to set as goals to reduce time on. Is also used to show users how much time they are saving compared to before installing HabitLab. * idle: We use this for determining when the user is idle, so we don't count that time in our time tracker. notifications: We use notifications such as "You already spent 10 minutes on Facebook today" as a type of productivity intervention to help reduce users' time on sites they set as their goal sites. * http://*/ and https://*/: Our productivity interventions (such as showing timers, removing feeds, pausing video auto-play, etc) are shown on all sites, so we need the 'http://*/' and 'https://*/' permissions. PRIVACY POLICY HabitLab sends us anonymized data about the effects of interventions on your browsing. You can opt-out of sharing data when you set up HabitLab, or later. See https://github.com/habitlab/habitlab/wiki/Privacy for our privacy policy.

The latest version of HabitLab is available on the Chrome web and is currently being used by 5,000 active users. The initial version was launched on 2020-05-25.

HOW TO INSTALL HabitLab FROM A CRX FILE

1. Download HabitLab CRX file
2. NOTE: Sometimes the browser may block downloading / installing CRX file from outside the Chrome Web Store. If so, you may need to download the ZIP file instead
3. In the URL bar, go to chrome://extensions
4. Enable Developer mode

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