Incomplete evidence: evidence was cut short before completion (the visit hit the scanner's request-recording cap, so its counts are truncated; the in-page fingerprint observer could not read every frame, so the fingerprinting evidence is incomplete). 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 and LinkedIn domains.
Retained request rows include 23 distinct catalogued tracking-service entities; 23 of the retained service matches recorded responses across at least 155 retained cross-site domains. A catalog match identifies the service domain, not why the request occurred or what it carried.
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, cookie counts are an incomplete end-state snapshot and storage counts are an incomplete end-state snapshot.
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.
What was checked
Page
https://www.usatoday.com/
When
Sep 7, 2026, 4:50 AM UTC
Setup
Both visits used headless Chromium in a desktop window of 1440 × 980, with en-US language and UTC time zone. Both ran from a GitHub Actions Ubuntu runner; the network region was not recorded. Neither sent the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal.
Visits
Two visits configured to differ in Brave-list blocking: No blocking and Brave-list blocking.
Interactions
No typing was recorded in either visit. No scrolling, clicking or consent interaction.
Outcome
Both visits completed, but some evidence in the No blocking visit was cut short.
What these visits could not see
Other pages on this site. Only the requested page's activity was recorded. The privacy policy was opened only to read its text, and none of its activity was recorded.
Signed-in visitors, other browsers and other regions. Both visits were automated, from a fixed en-US / UTC profile. Sites can behave differently for real users, browsers, regions, accounts, or network locations.
Anything that loads only after interaction or consent. Trackers that load that late are not observed, so counts are a lower bound.
Services the catalog does not name. Service labels use a US-biased hand-curated catalog, so regional services may be under-labeled.
Checks with incomplete evidence. In the No blocking visit: every check. Every card below states only what was retained.
Worth checking
at least 541 retained requests matched Brave Shields filter lists
at least 541 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 443 retained request rows in this visit.Show matched requests
Context
This Shields comparison is not conclusive
The "No blocking" visit hit the 1,000-request recording cap, so its counts are truncated.
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.
Tracking companies the privacy policy does not appear to name
PubMatic, Taboola and OpenX, plus 6 others were sent requests during this visit. However, 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://*.usatoday.com/privacy; 0 checkable statements matched; 1 of 10 observed tracking companies named in the policy. Policy mentions of Magnite, Amazon Ads and Equativ are unknown because the historical alias matcher was incomplete.
Opens the request log at its catalog-matched rows, which include the requests to the companies this card names.
Review-worthy
Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit
PubMatic, Google and Taboola, 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 advertising / supply-side platform, advertising and analytics / tag management. This scan could not identify 117 of the 155 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 947 retained cross-site requests across at least 155 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.
Incomplete evidence: Google Analytics present, no remarketing signal in retained evidence before collection stopped
Google Analytics was observed, but no DoubleClick remarketing sync appears in the retained evidence.
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.
255 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.
Opens this site's history page, which lists the third-party cookie count each of its retained reports recorded.
Context
Incomplete evidence: No fingerprint-like API calls observed in retained evidence before collection stopped
The retained evidence holds no calls to 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 hit the scanner's request-recording cap, so its counts are truncated; the in-page fingerprint observer could not read every frame, so the fingerprinting evidence is incomplete; derived from status and warnings
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
151.0.7922.34
Redaction
not recorded by this schema
Provenance
Exact build and instrument digests were not recorded by this legacy schema.
Variant visit
Started
Run quality
complete; derived from status and warnings
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
151.0.7922.34
Redaction
not recorded by this schema
Provenance
Exact build and instrument digests were not recorded by this legacy schema.
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. 17 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 14 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 .