Site Behavior Lab

Baseline visit v2 schema (r2)

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/

Aug 14, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

cut short: the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; request evidence was censored before completion — 757 request routing or recording events were cut off at the configured ceiling; 53 proxy transactions were refused by the connection and target safety budget; fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); detector output evidence was censored before completion — the privacy-policy link search did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner

Public corrections ledger · SBL-CORR-2026-002

This report has a reviewed clarification

SBL-CORR-2026-002: The policy entity matcher did not recognize Amazon and Oracle under their catalog names. An unmentioned-entity result for Amazon Ads or Oracle Advertising is not reliable evidence that the policy omitted the company. Original policy text was not retained, so individual mention results cannot be reconstructed. Consult all clarification events for this report.

Read the public review record

Evidence quality

This report is built on an incomplete visit

Incomplete evidence: evidence was cut short before completion (the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; and 4 more). Counts for the affected evidence are lower bounds; families that completed carry only their ordinary limits. The evidence receipt states the exact per-visit quality.

What this actually means

apnews.com's retained request log includes catalogued Google and LinkedIn domains.

SBL-CORR-2026-002: The policy entity matcher did not recognize Amazon and Oracle under their catalog names. An unmentioned-entity result for Amazon Ads or Oracle Advertising is not reliable evidence that the policy omitted the company. Original policy text was not retained, so individual mention results cannot be reconstructed. Consult all clarification events for this report.

≥23tracking-service entities retained
≥936cross-site requests
222third-party cookie records

Plain-Language Findings

What this visit means

Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary
playwright-chromium

Review-worthy

Bottom line: this visit has review-worthy signals

The scan observed signals a non-expert should not have to decode from raw request tables. Some activity evidence was also incomplete: request counts are retained lower bounds.

The cards below translate the evidence into plain language. This failed or incomplete evidence is not ranked against corpus percentiles; positive signals remain visible as lower bounds. The request log, domain table, and methodology remain below for verification.

at least 1,000 retained requests observed in one controlled visit.

Worth checking

at least 479 retained requests out of 999 requests the engine evaluated matched Brave Shields filter lists

at least 479 retained requests matched the default filter lists of Brave Shields, the ad and tracker blocker built into the Brave browser, while loading normally.

Computed with Brave's own ad-block engine and default filter lists in classification mode: matched requests were not blocked by the scanner and remain in this report's observed request counts. Matching shows what Shields would target on this visit's traffic; an actual Shields visit blocks these and also prevents their follow-on requests, so this number is neither a measured block count nor the total effect.

The hand-curated service catalog separately matched at least 261 retained request rows in this visit.Show matched requests

Context

This GPC comparison supports no comparable delta

The pair did not record the network egress region for both visits, and an unrecorded condition never counts as matching., The baseline visit's collection was cut short by a recording cap, so its numbers are floors, not totals. and The variant visit did not completely capture this evidence family, so its values are unavailable or incomplete rather than comparable totals.

The raw request logs of both visits remain below for transparency, but the diff between them supports no claim about what the compared condition changed.

3 disqualifying conditions named by the report's claim policy.

Worth checking

Consent tooling and requests to tracking-service entities appeared before any choice

apnews.com sent a request to OneTrust, a consent management platform (the tooling that shows cookie banners), and the request log included at least 23 retained distinct catalogued tracking-related services before the scanner made any consent choice; 23 companies answered.

A request to the platform's loader proves the page attempted to fetch consent tooling; an observed response supports delivery, but neither fact proves a banner was visibly shown to this scanner. Banner display can vary by region and visit context. The scanner never clicks a banner in this mode, so this report records requests made before the scanner made a consent choice. It does not determine whether any request required consent or whether the site's behavior complied with applicable law. More tracking-service entities or requests may appear after "Accept" than this report captures, so the counts here are lower bounds for users who consent.

Consent platform detected via a request to cdn.cookielaw.org.

Context

Tracking companies the privacy policy does not appear to name

LiveRamp, Cloudflare and The Trade Desk, plus 8 others were sent requests during this visit, but the policy text matched none of the names this scan knows those companies by.

Policies often disclose vendor categories rather than company names, so an unnamed vendor is a transparency gap worth reviewing, not automatically a violation. Named in the policy: Google, PubMatic and OpenX, plus 6 others.

Policy at https://apnews.com/{seg}; 0 checkable statements matched; 9 of 20 observed tracking companies named in the policy; policy mentions of Amazon Ads are unknown because the historical alias matcher was incomplete.

Review-worthy

Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit

Google, PubMatic and Amazon Ads, plus 20 others appeared in the request log.

A catalog match identifies a maintainer-reviewed service/domain mapping; it does not establish why an individual request occurred, what it carried, or whether profiling happened. Functional catalog labels include analytics / tag management, advertising and advertising / supply-side platform. This scan could not identify 138 of the 181 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates them. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site.

at least 936 retained cross-site requests across at least 181 retained third-party hosts.Show third-party requests

Context

Requests were dispatched to catalogued major-platform domains

This visit dispatched requests to catalogued domains for Google and LinkedIn.

The domain matches identify services, not the requests' purpose, payload, or whether any profile linking occurred.

at least 47 retained requests to these platforms.Show catalog-matched requests

Context

Incomplete evidence: Google Analytics present, no remarketing signal in retained evidence before collection stopped

Google Analytics was observed, but no DoubleClick remarketing sync appeared in this visit.

Standard analytics collection was observed, without the stats.g.doubleclick.net advertising sync. Evidence collection was cut short, so this covers only what was recorded before the cutoff.

Google Analytics host observed; no stats.g.doubleclick.net request.Show catalog-matched requests

Review-worthy

Third-party cookies were present

222 third-party cookies showed up during the visit.

The scanner observed cookie metadata whose domain crossed the scanned site's registrable-domain boundary. This report does not retain cookie values or partition keys, so it does not establish whether a cookie was a persistent identifier or could recognize a visitor across sites.

272 cookies total in this report.

Context

Incomplete evidence: No fingerprint-like API calls observed in retained evidence before collection stopped

The scan did not observe the instrumented high-entropy browser APIs.

This is an observation layer, not proof that fingerprinting is impossible. Evidence collection was cut short, so this covers only what was recorded before the cutoff.

Retained incomplete evidence includes 0 API event records; no exact API-family total is available.

Raw evidence

Open the interactive evidence explorer

The findings above are built from the stored report. Load the request rows, domains, cookies, storage keys, browser signals, visit phases, charts and CSV export when you want to check them; the versioned report JSON is always available below without this interface.

This versioned report is currently retained in the public corpus. Follow the currently retained site history, repeat the same public route when it is available, or request a transparent evidence correction.

Report ID
20260814-469dd801c3015de7d2d2f04ed56ec14c
Site
apnews.com
Latest visit
Schema
v2 schema (r2)
Verify recorded provenance

Baseline visit

Started
Run quality
cut short: the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; request evidence was censored before completion — 757 request routing or recording events were cut off at the configured ceiling; 53 proxy transactions were refused by the connection and target safety budget; fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); detector output evidence was censored before completion — the privacy-policy link search did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
151.0.7922.34
Redaction
version 4
Methodology
shields-request-context-v2-adblock-rust-0.13.2-request-method-v1-playwright-1.62.1+subject-validity-v2+detector-coverage-v2+phase-kernel-v2+boundary-state-v1+consent-r2-v4+resource-budget-v1+proxy-traffic-v1+service-worker-block-v1+detector-accountability-v1+service-role-taxonomy-v1
Detector registry
node-detectors-v4100de91713270067dff4f5ecebeea61d330982c7a5aa33395bae3dd604adedd2
Tracker catalog digest
e94970de235fc80254de8ed99b94316a252e52aa1c2e748c8fbfc3c093b908f4
Brave-list instrument
engine adblock-rust-0.13.20f52cc524a8999a1022279aca74003ece9720f267bc678430727b7312d43f0ac
Normalization
redaction-v4+allowlists-v3:269f631f04090ce582644ee3cf0e5c5b6bb425dc4929bc283607b808bc9322a9+public-string-policy-v3:6c78c05523e1f16c88264d0144af33587bd6dc11e04d337a6af2d58190639266+tldts@7.4.10+node-evidence-policy-v1+r2-http-status-compat-v1

Variant visit

Started
Run quality
cut short: request evidence was censored before completion — the producer recorded an additional collection loss (recorded loss count: 4); fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); detector output evidence was censored before completion — the privacy-policy link search did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
151.0.7922.34
Redaction
version 4
Methodology
shields-request-context-v2-adblock-rust-0.13.2-request-method-v1-playwright-1.62.1+subject-validity-v2+detector-coverage-v2+phase-kernel-v2+boundary-state-v1+consent-r2-v4+resource-budget-v1+proxy-traffic-v1+service-worker-block-v1+detector-accountability-v1+service-role-taxonomy-v1
Detector registry
node-detectors-v4100de91713270067dff4f5ecebeea61d330982c7a5aa33395bae3dd604adedd2
Tracker catalog digest
e94970de235fc80254de8ed99b94316a252e52aa1c2e748c8fbfc3c093b908f4
Brave-list instrument
engine adblock-rust-0.13.20f52cc524a8999a1022279aca74003ece9720f267bc678430727b7312d43f0ac
Normalization
redaction-v4+allowlists-v3:269f631f04090ce582644ee3cf0e5c5b6bb425dc4929bc283607b808bc9322a9+public-string-policy-v3:6c78c05523e1f16c88264d0144af33587bd6dc11e04d337a6af2d58190639266+tldts@7.4.10+node-evidence-policy-v1+r2-http-status-compat-v1

Recorded provenance is self-reported measurement metadata, not a cryptographic attestation. The public versioned report JSON contains the retained public evidence; see the methodology for interpretation and retention limits.

This report covers what the scanner measures, not everything a site can do. 16 browser surfaces are not instrumented at all (Every page except the one that was scanned; Anything that only loads after scrolling or interaction; Why a request happened, as a causal chain; and 13 others), 3 capabilities are declined by policy, and 3 are outside what any single visit can see. Their absence from this report is not evidence that they did not occur. Read the published coverage boundary.

Detector accuracy is unmeasured. No calibration study currently publishes a precision or recall for the detectors on this page, so a detector match here is a recorded observation, not a calibrated classification. A study has been recorded for pixel-events and does not support a published rate under the current build. How detector accuracy is measured.

Approved use boundary: This report is investigative evidence that requires independent corroboration. It is not a standalone legal determination and not the sole exhibit in a legal proceeding. Recorded in this project's release manifest on .