Flock Blocks Itself From Wayback Machine: How Companies Can Erase Their Public History (Public Report)Javascript is disabled. Enable javascript to view IPVM.<br>Contact us at info@ipvm.com for help.

Flock Blocks Itself From Wayback Machine: How Companies Can Erase Their Public History<br>IT

IPVM Team<br>•Published Jun 10, 2026 17:35 PM

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Flock has faced sustained criticism over the ethics of its surveillance contracts with law enforcement agencies across the country. A company that does work for government on behalf of the public has little legitimate basis for hiding its own record. Yet Flock has excluded its website from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the most widely used public tool for tracking how a company's claims, promises, and legal commitments change over time. Blocking the Wayback Machine does not change history. It makes it harder to find, and harder to prove when a company has said one thing and done another.

Executive Summary

The move erases the most accessible record of a site that has undergone documented, material changes since July 2025: at least four revisions to its terms and conditions, removal of a key "shall not sell data" promise, significant marketing repositioning, and the addition of perpetual data rights.

This is highly irregular for a government vendor whose public-facing legal commitments are under active scrutiny. Flock may see it as routine legal or reputational risk management, limiting the ease with which past statements can be used against it. Critics and civil liberties organizations will likely view it as confirmation of what they have long argued: that Flock is a company actively working to reduce accountability rather than embrace it.

The date this was done is not known, but Wayback Machine captures of flocksafety.com were still accessible during IPVM's reporting in 2025.

No Response From Flock or the Internet Archive

IPVM contacted Flock requesting comment on the Wayback Machine exclusion. Flock did not respond. IPVM also contacted the Internet Archive to ask about the exclusion. The Internet Archive did not respond. As a result, the specific method Flock used to obtain the exclusion remains unconfirmed.

Background

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has been archiving the web since 1996. Its Wayback Machine has captured hundreds of billions of web pages and serves as the default public record for how websites change over time. Journalists, researchers, lawyers, and government officials routinely use it to document that a company said one thing at one point and something different later.

For accountability purposes, the Wayback Machine is particularly significant for companies that update their websites frequently without publishing version histories, including companies that revise legal terms, data policies, or marketing claims without announcement.

Flock vs. Peers

IPVM checked the Wayback Machine for more than a dozen surveillance and government technology vendors, including Axon, Palantir, Hikvision, Dahua, Huawei, Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and ICE. Every one of them has an active archive history. Flock was the only one excluded.

To illustrate what that means in practice: Palantir, a government technology vendor that has itself faced significant criticism, has been saved more than 7,300 times on the Wayback Machine since 1999. Axon, Flock's direct competitor in the law enforcement technology space, has more than 3,700 captures since 1998. Flock has none. Not because it is a new company, but because it has specifically excluded itself.

Palantir — 7,332 Wayback Machine captures:

Axon — 3,723 Wayback Machine captures:

Flock — excluded:

What Flock Has Changed

Flock's website has undergone material changes on multiple fronts since July 2025, changes that would normally be trackable using the Wayback Machine.

On marketing: Flock removed its flagship claim, "Eliminate crime in your community," from its website in mid-2025, replacing it with "Shaping the future of safety, together." The company added a new "Privacy & Ethics" section and significantly softened language about crime elimination. IPVM documented that shift in detail.

On terms and conditions: Flock updated its T&C at least four times since July 22, 2025. The February 2026 revision, documented by IPVM, removed an explicit contractual promise that Flock "shall not sell Customer Data," added a perpetual license to use municipal surveillance footage after contract termination, and eliminated the gross negligence exception to its liability cap. A separate revision imposed mandatory arbitration under Georgia law and restricted non-appropriation rights.

Each of those changes would, under normal circumstances, be straightforwardly verifiable by comparing archived snapshots. They are not, because the Wayback Machine has no captures of Flock's website to compare.

IPVM checked Flock's...