Site Behavior Lab

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

www.paypal.com

https://www.paypal.com/

Sep 7, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

complete; derived from status and warnings

What this actually means

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

The visit with no blocking made 108 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 27 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked, plus run-to-run variance.

1tracking-service entity
96cross-site requests
1third-party cookie record

Plain-Language Findings

What this visit means

Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary
playwright-chromium

Worth checking

Bottom line: this visit has review-worthy signals

The scan observed signals a non-expert should not have to decode from raw request tables.

The cards below translate the evidence into plain language. Where a measured distribution exists, severity ranks this visit against percentiles from the report's exact schema, methodology, tracker-catalog, ServiceRole-taxonomy, metric-contract, producer, and Global Privacy Control cohort, with each percentile card naming its metric-specific measured-site denominator (among 98 sites with a successful load across all cohorts; other methodologies, request-capped visits, and post-choice consent visits are excluded from this denominator, while failed or block-page attempts are outside that coverage), a curated set of popular, mostly commercial sites, not a random sample of the web, and otherwise uses fixed reference thresholds. The request log, domain table, and methodology remain below for verification.

108 requests observed in one controlled visit.

Worth checking

13 requests matched Brave Shields filter lists

13 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 1 request row in this visit.Show matched requests

Nothing observed

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

With the scanner 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; application was not verified), this paired visit showed 10 fewer third-party requests and 1 fewer tracking-related service request.

Services only seen in the unblocked visit: Google. The blocking visit's engine directly blocked 27 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), so 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, so nothing was compared against this visit's evidence (1 of 1 observed tracking company 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.

Policy at https://www.paypal.com/{seg}/privacy/{seg}; 0 checkable statements matched; 1 of 1 observed tracking company named in the policy.

Context

Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit

Google 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. This scan could not identify 4 of the 7 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates them. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site.

96 cross-site requests across 7 third-party hosts.At or above the median for third-party domains across the 88 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.

1 request to these platforms.Show catalog-matched requests

Nothing observed

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

1 third-party cookie 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.

13 cookies total in this report.At or above the median for third-party cookies across the 88 sites measured for this metric.

Context

Input-monitoring signal involving a script from another domain

Listener coverage that could observe typing-related input events was registered through call chains that included a script served from another registrable domain, whose operator this scan did not establish.

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, 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, so the card 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.

274 interaction-listener registrations with https://www.paypalobjects.com/ in the registration call chain and 442 input-listener registrations with https://www.paypalobjects.com/ in the registration call chain

Context

Fingerprint-like browser APIs were called

2 high-entropy API calls appeared in the instrumentation log.

These calls can be legitimate (charts, graphics, media), so the count is observational, not a severity score, and it excludes Web and Service Workers. Top calls: webgl.getParameter.UNMASKED_RENDERER_WEBGL and webgl.getParameter.UNMASKED_VENDOR_WEBGL.

2 API families recorded.

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
20260907-52582af58e4f4275ee1cb6024d8134d6
Site
www.paypal.com
Latest visit
Schema
v1 schema · facts legacy-derived · descriptive report
Verify recorded provenance

Baseline visit

Started
Run quality
complete; 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
complete; 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. 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 .