A few websites, like Mobility Today, The Cult of Mac (Wired) and Gizmodo wrote today about a Flickr user who had uploaded photos of their MacBook Pro power connector. The connector had caught on fire and the user’s photos documented this. Someone at Apple saw them and asked the user to remove them. The user agreed to remove them and did so. In the telephone game of blogging, that became:

Adding insult to injury, soon thereafter Apple contacted Flickr and asked that the pictures be removed, and Flickr inexplicably complied with that “request.” (link)

The person who wrote that just completely made it up. Apple did not contact us. We did not remove the photos. In fact, we only heard about this because some people have written in complaining about our "censorship".

Though we will remove photos that violate our terms of service, the community guidelines or when requested to do so through a DMCA copyright takedown request, we would not remove users’ photos simply because someone else did not like the contents.

To summarize: people make stuff up, don’t believe everything you read, and to the three sites listed above: "Tsk tsk. Lame. At least take a look before writing." (The user very clearly explained what happened and that they removed the photos by themselves, of their own choice.)