www.usatoday.com

This report

• Consent comparison runs are sequential automated visits: one asked to click the banner's accept-all choice, one asked to click reject-all (first layer only). A run where no control was clicked reflects the pre-consent state instead; see each run's consent note. Differences can also come from timing, experiments, cache state, or bot detection.

Both visits

• Each visit in this report is one automated, headless Chromium visit from a fixed en-US / UTC profile, with no scrolling or clicking except one scripted choice on the cookie/consent banner (disclosed below). Sites can behave differently for real users, browsers, regions, accounts, or network locations.
• Counts are a lower bound: trackers that load only after further interaction, and any activity inside Web or Service Workers, are not observed. Service labels use a US-biased hand-curated catalog, so regional services may be under-labeled. Cookie and storage figures are an end-of-visit snapshot.
• The scan stopped recording or loading additional requests after 1000 requests.
• The page did not reach network idle before the scan window ended.
• This scan typed a synthetic test value into 2 form fields (never submitting the form) to test whether typed input is captured and sent to third parties. The value is synthetic and is not stored.
• Read the site's privacy policy (https://{label}.usatoday.com/privacy) and compared its text against this visit's observed behavior. Policy checks are an automated text match with the matched sentences quoted, not a legal reading.

Accept-all attempt visit only

• Blocked a request that could not be verified as public: https://test.com/
• Blocked a request that could not be verified as public: https://{label}.omnitagjs.com/{seg}/{seg}
• Blocked a request that could not be verified as public: https://{label}.iqzone.com/{seg}
• This visit was asked to choose "Accept all" on a cookie/consent banner, but no recognizable control was found (the banner may not be shown to this scanner's location, the choice may sit behind a settings layer, or the control is not in the catalog). Results reflect the pre-consent state.
• One or more requests were blocked or failed at connection time. This scan did not record whether that was a private-address guard block or an ordinary connection failure (a DNS or connect error), so no private-network claim is made.

Reject-all attempt visit only

• This visit was asked to choose "Reject all" on a cookie/consent banner, but no recognizable control was found (the banner may not be shown to this scanner's location, the choice may sit behind a settings layer, or the control is not in the catalog). Results reflect the pre-consent state.