Site Behavior Lab

Baseline visit Older format: some facts reconstructed, descriptive only

www.stanford.edu

Requested addresshttps://www.stanford.edu/

Sep 7, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

Evidence quality

This report is built on an incomplete visit

Incomplete evidence: evidence was cut short before completion (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

stanford.edu recorded 10 fewer third-party requests in the visit configured for Brave-list blocking.

The visit with no blocking made 123 requests; the visit configured to apply Brave's ad-block engine and default Shields filter lists (a simulation in this scanner's browser, not a live Brave-browser visit) recorded 10 fewer third-party requests. The blocker directly stopped 5 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked, plus run-to-run variance.

2tracking-service entities
85cross-site requests
5third-party cookie records

Plain-Language Findings

What this visit means

Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary
playwright-chromium

Context

Bottom line: this visit has signals, none ranked worth checking

The scan observed signals a non-expert should not have to decode from raw request tables. Some detector evidence was incomplete; each affected detector card states its own retained or unavailable scope, while completed request, cookie, and storage measurements keep their recorded exactness.

The cards below translate the evidence into plain language. Where a measured distribution exists, severity ranks this visit against percentiles from this report's cohort, with each percentile card naming its metric-specific measured-site denominator; otherwise it uses fixed reference thresholds. That cohort is drawn from a curated set of popular, mostly commercial sites, not a random sample of the web. The request log, domain table, and methodology remain below for verification.

123 requests observed in one controlled visit.

What was checked

Page
https://www.stanford.edu/
When
Sep 7, 2026, 5:17 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
Typed a made-up test value into 1 form field in each visit, never submitting the form. No scrolling, clicking or consent interaction.
Outcome
Both visits completed, but some evidence 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 both visits: the privacy policy check, session-recording signals, fingerprinting, the typing test, CNAME cloaking, advertising pixels and the consent banner. Each linked card states what was retained.

Context

8 requests matched Brave Shields filter lists

8 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 8 request rows in this visit.Show matched requests

Not flagged

Lower values observed across comparable metrics in the Brave-list blocking attempt

The blocking visit ran with the scanner configured to apply Brave's ad-block engine and default Shields filter lists. It was a simulation in this scanner's browser, not a live Brave-browser visit, and application was not verified. Compared with the unblocked visit, it showed 10 fewer third-party requests and 8 fewer tracking-related service requests.

Services only seen in the unblocked visit: Google and Contentsquare. The blocking visit's engine directly blocked 5 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked. A single paired comparison can also reflect run-to-run variance (ad rotation, caching, experiments). Treat this as an observed difference, not a measured blocking rate.

Signed per-metric differences between the two visits; nothing is summed across metrics.Show matched requests

Context

Privacy policy read; it made no statement this scan can check

None of the statements this scan knows how to check appear in the policy text. As a result, nothing was compared against this visit's evidence (2 of 2 observed tracking companies named in the policy). That is a limit of the automated check, not a finding about the site either way.

Statements checked automatically: blanket no-cookie claims, third-party-cookie claims, and combined do-not-sell-or-share claims against advertising-pixel identifier fields. Global Privacy Control claims are never checked against request counts, which cannot show whether selling or sharing stopped. Evidence collection was cut short, so this covers only what was recorded before the cutoff.

Policy at https://www.stanford.edu/privacy; 0 checkable statements matched; 2 of 2 observed tracking companies named in the policy.

Context

Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit

Google and Contentsquare 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 session replay / behavior analytics. This scan could not identify 1 of the 11 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates it. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site. Catalog labels include session-replay or behavior-analytics services: Contentsquare. The domain match alone does not prove that a recording occurred.

85 cross-site requests across 11 third-party hosts.At or above the median for third-party domains across the 81 sites measured for this metric. Modest distinct tracking-service entities count.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.

6 requests to these platforms.Show catalog-matched requests

Not flagged

Google Analytics present, no remarketing signal

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.

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

Context

Third-party cookies were present

5 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.

10 cookies total in this report.At or above the median for third-party cookies across the 81 sites measured for this metric.

Look closer

See other visits' cookie counts

Opens this site's history page, which lists the third-party cookie count each of its retained reports recorded.

Context

Session-replay vendor observed

Contentsquare appeared in the request log.

This is a behavioral instrumentation signal from listener registration, stack-attributed script origins, and known-vendor requests: it shows the page was instrumented to observe interaction, not that anything was transmitted. Stack attribution records the script origins present in the bounded registration call chain. A cross-site origin in that chain does not by itself establish that the cross-site script registered the listener. That is because first-party code can register its own listeners through a helper served from elsewhere. A different registrable domain is also not by itself a different operator: sites commonly serve their own scripts from a separate asset domain. The card therefore says third party only when the catalog or reviewed ownership attributes an origin to another organization. On scanners that run the active keystroke-capture probe, actual transmission is tested separately (a synthetic value is typed, never real input, and no typed values are collected). Treat this card as a review prompt rather than proof.

Known session-replay vendor(s): Contentsquare.

Look closer

Show requests to Contentsquare

Opens this report's request log filtered to Contentsquare; listener registrations are not request rows, so the log cannot show what was observed.

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.

Report ID
20260907-4e77812a057b6cdcd7baa7fb1ec44b6d
Site
www.stanford.edu
Latest visit
Schema
v1 schema · facts legacy-derived · descriptive report
Verify recorded provenance

Baseline visit

Started
Run quality
cut short: 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
cut short: 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.

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.

Severity percentiles come from this report's exact schema, methodology, tracker-catalog, ServiceRole-taxonomy, metric-contract, producer, and Global Privacy Control cohort. Each percentile card's measured sites are among 99 sites with a successful load across all cohorts. Other methodologies, request-capped visits, and post-choice consent visits are excluded from each card's denominator, while failed or block-page attempts are outside that coverage.

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 .