The trouble reported earlier with Apple Music seems to have attracted high level attention. James Pinkstone had reported that Apple Music deleted countless unique tracks he had stored in iTunes, and that an Apple service rep assured him this was correct behavior.
As he describes in a later blog post, Apple contacted him promptly. They assured him that file deletion is not an intended feature of Apple Music, and they sent engineers to try to figure it out.
This doesn’t change my own conclusion: the only way to ensure ownership of electronic media is to remove copy protection. This requires a bit of geeking around on a desktop. If your ebooks and music reside exclusively in proprietary apps, like Kindle or the Apple products, then the vendor can delete them at will. It happened on the Kindle.
[UPDATE: Apple now claims this was a bug; 
The University of Minnesota’s HR department send me an email in January telling me that I had to submit to a background check. The good news: I do them all the time.
Computing technology is insanely reliable when you look at statistical error rates. Hard drives read and write trillions of bits while rarely producing a reportable error. But when you want some data to live forever (like family photos or critical business records), even an occasional error is a problem.
I’m upgrading my iPhone and trading in the old one. I had to erase the old one completely and unhook “Find my iPhone” from it.
If you have the technical interest to read this, you probably do a lot of your finances with your personal computer. Taxes, monthly budgets, check printing (on those rare occasions), and tracking numerous accounts – computers are far better than people at handling such details. A typical personal computer, or smart phone for that matter, contains company names, account numbers, login credentials, and everything else an identity thief might need. This is reasonably safe as long as you don’t lose your device and/or its hard drive.