Site Behavior Lab

Baseline visit v1 schema · facts legacy-derived · descriptive report

www.usatoday.com

https://www.usatoday.com/

Jul 27, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

cut short: the visit hit the scanner's request-recording cap, so its counts are truncated; the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; the in-page fingerprint observer could not read every frame, so the fingerprinting evidence is incomplete; derived from status and warnings

Public corrections ledger · SBL-CORR-2026-001

This report has a reviewed clarification

SBL-CORR-2026-001: The historical input-probe disclosure overstates coverage. Unload-only transmissions were not reliably recorded. Focus and blur handlers could run, and per-field failures were not fully counted. These reports cannot establish absence of input transmission outside their retained observations.

Read the public review record

Evidence quality

This report is built on an incomplete visit

Incomplete evidence: evidence was cut short before completion (the visit hit the scanner's request-recording cap, so its counts are truncated; the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; and 1 more). 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.

SBL-CORR-2026-001: The historical input-probe disclosure overstates coverage. Unload-only transmissions were not reliably recorded. Focus and blur handlers could run, and per-field failures were not fully counted. These reports cannot establish absence of input transmission outside their retained observations.

≥19tracking-service entities retained
≥959cross-site requests
Snapshot incompletethird-party cookie records

Plain-Language Findings

What this visit means

Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary
playwright-chromium

Review-worthy

Bottom line: this visit has review-worthy signals

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.

Worth checking

at least 554 retained requests matched Brave Shields filter lists

at least 554 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 375 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. and The "No blocking" visit exhausted its proxy connection and target safety budget, so its request evidence is incomplete.

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.

2 disqualifying conditions named by the report's claim policy.Show matched requests

Review-worthy

Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit

Magnite, Google and Taboola, plus 16 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 115 of the 151 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 959 retained cross-site requests across at least 151 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.

at least 62 retained requests to these platforms.Show catalog-matched requests

Context

Incomplete evidence: Google Analytics present, no remarketing signal in retained evidence before collection stopped

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. Evidence collection was cut short, so this covers only what was recorded before the cutoff.

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

Review-worthy

Third-party cookies were present

305 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.

329 cookies total in this report.

Context

Incomplete evidence: No fingerprint-like API calls observed in retained evidence before collection stopped

The scan did not observe 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
20260727-509bb57e6b43e7ea7003a5f4577209b6
Site
www.usatoday.com
Latest visit
Schema
v1 schema · facts legacy-derived · descriptive report
Verify recorded provenance

Baseline visit

Started
Run quality
cut short: the visit hit the scanner's request-recording cap, so its counts are truncated; the visit hit the scan proxy's traffic budget, so it stopped forwarding further traffic; 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
149.0.7827.55
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
149.0.7827.55
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. 16 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 13 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. 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 .