cut short: the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; request evidence was censored before completion — 1,143 request routing or recording events were cut off at the configured ceiling; fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner
SBL-CORR-2026-001: The historical input-probe disclosure overstates coverage. Unload-only transmissions were not reliably recorded. Focus and blur handlers could run, and per-field failures were not fully counted. These reports cannot establish absence of input transmission outside their retained observations.
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.
Incomplete evidence: evidence was cut short before completion (the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; request evidence was censored before completion — 1,143 request routing or recording events were cut off at the configured ceiling; and 2 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
usatoday.com's retained request log includes catalogued Google 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.
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 607 retained requests out of 998 requests the engine evaluated matched Brave Shields filter lists
at least 607 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 363 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.
Context
Tracking companies the privacy policy does not appear to name
Magnite, Taboola and PubMatic, 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.
Policy at https://{label}.usatoday.com/privacy; 0 checkable statements matched; 1 of 12 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
Magnite, Google and Taboola, plus 16 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 advertising / supply-side platform, advertising and analytics / tag management. This scan could not identify 91 of the 125 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 965 retained cross-site requests across at least 125 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.
The domain matches identify services, not the requests' purpose, payload, or whether any profile linking occurred.
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.
254 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.
277 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.
cut short: the visit exhausted its 1,000-request routing and recording budget; request evidence was censored before completion — 1,143 request routing or recording events were cut off at the configured ceiling; fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner
cut short: request evidence was censored before completion — the producer recorded an additional collection loss (recorded loss count: 2); fingerprinting evidence was censored before completion — the in-page fingerprint observer did not finish (recorded loss count: 1); recorded by the scanner
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 .