Overview
Governance classification of this tag is complicated by its dual nature. The same JavaScript snippet serves both customer support (potentially essential, no consent required) and marketing automation (behavioural targeting, product tours, requiring consent). Collects visitor behaviour data including page views, session duration, and custom events, transmitting it to US-based servers. Organisations must carefully delineate which Intercom features are active to determine the correct legal basis.
Detection capabilities
- Signature count
- 5
- Detection methods
- network
- Property types
- hostnamepathname
Performance impact
Performance Impact
- Script size
- 250 KB
- Requests per page
- 2
Common mistakes
- 1Treating Intercom as purely a customer support tool exempt from consent requirements, when it also collects behavioural data for marketing segmentation and automated messaging
- 2Loading the Intercom messenger widget on all pages without assessing whether the behavioural tracking it performs is proportionate - Intercom tracks page views and session data even when the chat is not used
- 3Not configuring Intercom's identity verification, which can allow impersonation of logged-in users through the client-side API
- 4Failing to assess the data stored in Intercom's platform against data retention policies - conversation histories and user profiles can accumulate significant personal data over time
- 5Using Intercom's product tours and targeted messaging features without recognising that these involve behavioural profiling that may require separate consent
Related services
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