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
nytimes.com recorded 294 fewer third-party requests in the visit configured for Brave-list blocking.
The visit with no blocking made 755 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 294 fewer third-party requests. The blocker directly stopped 25 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked, plus run-to-run variance.
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.
755 requests observed in one controlled visit.
What was checked
Page
https://www.nytimes.com/
When
Sep 7, 2026, 4:48 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.
Checks with incomplete evidence. In both visits: CNAME cloaking, the privacy policy check, fingerprinting, session-recording signals, the typing test, advertising pixels and the consent banner. Each linked card states what was retained.
Worth checking
209 requests matched Brave Shields filter lists
209 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 180 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 294 fewer third-party requests, 58 fewer third-party cookies and 178 fewer tracking-related service requests.
Services only seen in the unblocked visit: Amazon Ads, Magnite and Index Exchange, plus 17 others. The blocking visit's engine directly blocked 25 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
Worth checking
1 first-party DNS alias matched tracking checks
Of the resolved targets, 1 matched Brave filter lists; those matches do not identify the operators.
The scanner followed DNS CNAME chains from first-party subdomains and checked resolved targets against the service catalog and Brave filter lists. These matches do not establish a request's purpose, profiling, or an intent to conceal tracking. A filter-list match alone is not a verified service identity or proof of tracking.
Tracking companies the privacy policy does not appear to name
Index Exchange, PubMatic and TripleLift, plus 7 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, Chartbeat and Comscore.
Policy at https://help.nytimes.com/…; 0 checkable statements matched; 3 of 13 observed tracking companies named in the policy. Policy mentions of Amazon Ads and Magnite 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
Google, Amazon Ads and Magnite, plus 18 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 42 of the 82 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates them. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site. The role taxonomy assigns these additional services explicitly non-tracking operational, support, security, consent-management, or hosting roles: Datadog.
426 cross-site requests across 82 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.
58 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.
89 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
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 .