SBL-CORR-2026-005: In these reports the privacy-policy cross-check read a privacy hub, a page that links to the site's policy without containing it, as the policy itself. Company names were matched only against that page, so the card listing tracking companies the policy does not appear to name is not evidence that the policy omits them, and the policy may name them. Requests and other observations are unaffected. Consult all clarification events for this report.
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
theguardian.com recorded 547 fewer third-party requests in the visit configured for Brave-list blocking.
SBL-CORR-2026-005: In these reports the privacy-policy cross-check read a privacy hub, a page that links to the site's policy without containing it, as the policy itself. Company names were matched only against that page, so the card listing tracking companies the policy does not appear to name is not evidence that the policy omits them, and the policy may name them. Requests and other observations are unaffected. Consult all clarification events for this report.
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.
693 requests observed in one controlled visit.
What was checked
Page
Requested https://www.theguardian.com/; both visits landed on https://www.theguardian.com/us
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 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.
343 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 241 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 547 fewer third-party requests, 174 fewer third-party cookies and 241 fewer tracking-related service requests.
Services only seen in the unblocked visit: PubMatic, Google and Magnite, plus 20 others. The blocking visit's engine directly blocked 28 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
Tracking companies the privacy policy does not appear to name
PubMatic, The Trade Desk and Index Exchange, 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 and LinkedIn.
Policy at https://www.theguardian.com/…/privacy; 0 checkable statements matched; 2 of 11 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 Magnite, 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 advertising / demand-side platform. This scan could not identify 104 of the 139 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates them. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site.
649 cross-site requests across 139 third-party hosts.At or above the 90th-percentile mark for third-party domains across the 81 sites measured for this metric. High distinct tracking-service entities count (at or above the 12 reference threshold).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.
174 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.
196 cookies total in this report.At or above the 90th-percentile mark for third-party cookies across the 81 sites measured for this metric.
Opens this site's history page, which lists the third-party cookie count each of its retained reports recorded.
Context
Input-monitoring signal involving a third-party script
Listener coverage that could observe typing-related input events was registered through call chains that included a third-party script.
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.
Session-recording listener coverage: 52 interaction-listener registrations with https://assets.guim.co.uk/, https://cdn.brandmetrics.com/ and https://cdn.permutive.com/, plus 1 other in the registration call chain. Input-monitoring listener coverage: 51 input-listener registrations with https://assets.guim.co.uk/, https://cdn.brandmetrics.com/ and https://*.*.doubleclick.net/ in the registration call chain.
Opens this report's request log filtered to assets.guim.co.uk, a script origin recorded in the listener's call chain.
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 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 .