Flock Safety‘s entire business model depends on permanent, searchable records of where your car has been. The company sells automated license plate readers to cities and police departments across the country, positioning itself as a government vendor operating in the public interest. So it’s worth pausing on this: Flock has quietly requested that its own website be erased from the internet’s most accessible public archive. Attempt to access flocksafety.com via the Wayback Machine and you get one message — “This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine” — covering the entire domain, every subdomain, all of it.
How You Erase a Corporate Memory
Two mechanisms let companies vanish from the Wayback Machine — and Flock used the more deliberate one.
Companies can disappear from the Wayback Machine two ways. Robots.txt blocking suppresses captures based on crawler rules and can be applied retroactively. Manual exclusion is different — it produces that specific error message, applies host-level across all subdomains, and happens typically when site owners explicitly request it. According to an Internet Archive forum response, Flock’s exclusion exists because the site owners asked for it. That’s legal. It is not a neutral choice.
Here’s what’s now harder to independently verify:
- Removal of an explicit “shall not sell Customer Data” contractual commitment
- Addition of perpetual rights to use surveillance footage after municipal contracts end
- Narrowing of liability protections, including elimination of gross-negligence exceptions
- A shift away from “eliminate crime” marketing language toward softer framing
- Data retention defaults reduced on some products — framed as privacy-positive, while broader surveillance capabilities remain unchanged
“Blocking the Wayback Machine here protects a corporate actor whose business involves tracking the public, making its own evolving promises harder to audit while municipal contracts and public rights are at stake.”
— Paraphrasing civil liberties critics, consistent with ACLU documentation of Flock’s pattern of shifting public commitments
Quora also blocks the Wayback Machine, citing author re-identification risks. That’s a defensible user-privacy argument. Flock’s logic runs in the opposite direction — the entity shielded from historical scrutiny is the corporation itself. Meanwhile, Palantir, Axon, and Motorola Solutions — surveillance vendors facing significant regulatory and public scrutiny — all maintain active, searchable Wayback histories with extensive archived captures.
Transparency That Only Points One Way
Flock markets itself as “audit-ready,” but the only audit trail left is the one Flock controls.
While Flock’s marketing emphasizes “audit-ready use” and “accountability built in,” those promises now exist primarily in Flock’s own documentation. There is no longer an easily accessible, independent, timestamped public record via the Wayback Machine showing when language changed or what was quietly dropped.
The company built to remember everything about you has made itself very difficult to remember.
For municipal procurement officers and civil liberties advocates, the practical stakes are straightforward: if a vendor’s public commitments can be revised and archived out of existence at the same time, the evidentiary baseline for accountability disappears. Treating Wayback archivability of vendor legal terms as a due-diligence criterion going forward isn’t paranoia — it’s just overdue.
