[nurmara]

I sympathize with OP and I generally really hate Apple's direction when it comes to software and user experience ever since OS X Lion.

However, OP shouldn't claim that Apple 'stole' his music files. He signed up for a paid service and he should have checked how the service will affect his computer. We as users are responsible to know what software we're running on our machines and what it does to our data. I understand that a standard TOS agreement is ridiculously long and impractical to read, and I guess that's how we are trained to be lazy about protecting the integrity of our systems and our data, but that does not give OP the right to blame Apple for delivering exactly what they promised. I hate Apple but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim Apple stole OP's music.

[emodendroket]

Nobody on Earth reads the entire manual before starting up some software; it's the vendor's responsibility to not have insensible defaults like "delete my local versions of files without asking me"

[nurmara]

True. We have reached this level because of our complacency, and not due to Apple inherently trying to be malicious towards people like OP. The vendors are responsible to have sensible defaults, but we can't buy their products, use their software, sign up for their services, and then complain about malice when the vendors are delivering exactly what we signed up for and agreed upon. I'm just trying to say that OP should focus his energy on being more self conscious about what he signs up for rather than claiming that Apple is stealing his data. He gave up ownership of the data the moment he agreed to the TOS. What Apple is doing is counterproductive and just illogical from a UX point of view (in my opinion) but they did not steal OP's data. The title is a bit clickbait-y in that sense.

[emodendroket]

Well, they took a copy of it, compressed and maybe in a different version (which is more or less what they advertise) but then also irretrievably deleted the original, which is what he's upset about. Maybe "steal" is the wrong word; it still seems outrageous.

[mtone]

Reading a TOS provides no indication of what a software will do, just what it might do. Most of clauses quoted by OP appear in almost every TOS out there. Online documentation provides no assurance of being complete and accurate either. Open source requires the ability to navigate a code repository.

It's a sad state of affairs but as a user, trust and reviews are the main factors available in the decision to run software or not.