Does your website use third-party services? Get GDPR compliant in minutes.
Try FlowConsentFree plan · 10-min setup
Meebo was a US, based chat widget and web instant messaging aggregator launched in 2005, acquired by Google in 2012 and shut down a few months later. The service is no longer operational and any embed left on a website performs broken outbound requests rather than transmitting personal data. Compliance, wise the only relevant action today is to remove the legacy snippet from the page so it stops generating console errors and irrelevant network traffic.
Meebo was a web, based instant messaging and chat widget service founded in 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry. At its peak, Meebo aggregated AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber accounts into a single browser, based interface, then expanded into a chat bar that publishers could embed on their own websites to let visitors chat with operators or with each other. The Meebo Bar at the bottom of the page was particularly popular among publishers between 2008 and 2011 and at one point reached hundreds of millions of monthly users. Google LLC acquired the company in June 2012 to integrate the team and technology into Google Plus, and shut down most of the public products (Meebo Bar, Meebo IM, Meebo Rooms) on 11 July 2012.
While the service was active, the Meebo Bar set several third, party cookies on the meebo.com domain. MEEBO_LOGIN persisted the user''s logged, in state across sites that hosted the Meebo Bar; MEEBO_SID held the session identifier; AVID was an anonymous visitor identifier used for analytics; ULTGAB was an A/B testing cookie. Because Meebo was used both as a chat tool and as a cross, site presence widget, the cookies effectively built a profile of which Meebo, enabled sites a single user visited, which is precisely the kind of cross, site tracking that the modern ePrivacy Directive and GDPR target. None of this is live today, but historical privacy notices on legacy pages may still mention these cookies.
Because the meebo.com endpoints no longer respond to tracking requests, a legacy Meebo snippet on a public page does not transmit personal data and does not write live cookies. There is no active processor, no current data transfer, no Article 28 GDPR processor relationship to formalise. The remaining concerns are operational rather than regulatory: a broken script can generate console errors that confuse visitors and developers, or trigger Content Security Policy violations that show up in monitoring dashboards. The cleanest answer is simply to remove the snippet from the codebase.
Get GDPR compliant in 10 minutes
Free plan available · No credit card required
None today. Since no cookie can be written by an offline service, Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive is not triggered. If your CMP still lists Meebo in its registered third, party catalogue, remove the entry along with the snippet. Privacy policies that copy, paste boilerplate from older templates may still mention Meebo, in which case the entry should be deleted to avoid misleading visitors about the cookies actually present on the site.
None. The original Meebo service ran on US infrastructure operated by Meebo Inc. and then by Google LLC, but no live transfer to those servers takes place today because the service has been shut down. Operators who left the snippet in place can confirm via their browser network panel that requests to meebo.com fail to resolve or return errors. There is no Chapter V GDPR transfer to document.
Search the website source code for references to meebo.com, meebobar, meebome, and the AVID cookie. Remove every occurrence from the templates, theme files, tag manager containers, and any inline script blocks. Update the privacy policy and the CMP catalogue to remove historical Meebo entries. If you need a current chat widget, modern alternatives include Crisp (France), Brevo Conversations (France), HubSpot Chat, Intercom, Tidio (Poland), or self, hosted options like Chatwoot. None of them inherits Meebo''s cross, site tracking model: each is purpose, built for support chat and operates under modern GDPR baselines.
Websites using Meebo must obtain user consent under GDPR regulations.
DPIA considerations
Not applicable for the live product since it has been shut down since 2012. If a Meebo snippet is still present on archived pages, the only DPIA, related concern is to ensure that the script is removed so it does not generate noise in security logs or on, page console output. Document the historical use of Meebo in the record of processing activities only if you also need to maintain a record of historical processing for litigation or audit purposes.
Sample consent text
No active consent prompt is required for Meebo because the service has been discontinued since 2012 and any embed on this site is a non, functioning legacy snippet. We are working to remove these inactive scripts.
Third-party domains contacted
meebo.comb.meebo.comcim.meebo.comjs.meebocdn.netCookies placed
| Name | Type | Duration | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| MEEBO_LOGIN | third-party | Historical | Historical cookie set on the meebo.com domain to persist the user logged-in state across all sites that hosted the Meebo Bar. No longer set since the service was discontinued in July 2012. |
| MEEBO_SID | third-party | Historical | Historical session identifier used by the Meebo Bar to maintain session state. No longer active since the 2012 shutdown. |
| AVID | third-party | Historical | Historical anonymous visitor identifier set by Meebo for analytics and audience measurement. No longer set since Google shut down the Meebo service. |
| ULTGAB | third-party | Historical | Historical A/B testing cookie used by the Meebo Bar to assign visitors to experiment variants. No longer active. |
Meebo uses cookies for user preferences — inform visitors with a consent banner.
Historically the Meebo Bar set third, party cookies on the meebo.com domain, including MEEBO_LOGIN (login state across sites that hosted the bar), MEEBO_SID (session identifier), AVID (anonymous visitor identifier for analytics), and ULTGAB (A/B testing). None of these are written today because the meebo.com endpoints stopped responding when Google shut the service down in July 2012.
No active consent is required because Meebo has been shut down since 2012 and the meebo.com endpoints no longer respond. A legacy snippet on a page cannot write the historical cookies, so Article 5(3) ePrivacy is not triggered. The only useful action is to remove the snippet so it stops generating console errors and broken network requests.
Not applicable. There is no live processing because the service is offline. Operators who maintained Meebo on the legitimate, interest basis between 2008 and 2012 should keep the historical record only if needed for litigation or audit; no current legal basis is required.
No. The original Meebo service ran on US infrastructure (Meebo Inc., later Google LLC), but no live transfer occurs today because the service was shut down. Browser network panels confirm that requests to meebo.com fail to resolve.
No, the service is no longer operational. If you maintained a DPIA from the active period of Meebo, archive it with the rest of the historical processing documentation. No new DPIA is required.
You cannot, the service has been discontinued since July 2012. The compliant action today is to find every reference to meebo.com, meebobar, meebome, and the AVID cookie in your codebase and remove them. Update your privacy policy and CMP catalogue to delete legacy Meebo entries.
Yes. Modern chat widgets include Crisp (France), Brevo Conversations (France), HubSpot Chat, Intercom, Tidio (Poland), Tawk.to, LiveChat, and self, hosted alternatives like Chatwoot. None of them inherits Meebo's cross, site tracking model: each is purpose, built for support chat and operates under modern GDPR baselines.
Remove every reference to Meebo, the MEEBO_LOGIN, MEEBO_SID, AVID, and ULTGAB cookies, and the meebo.com domain from the privacy policy and the CMP catalogue. Replace it with whatever live chat tool you use today, or simply delete the section if no chat widget is currently embedded on the site.