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The point is that if you do do it, it's on you to understand the limitations of using someone else property. Just like the difference between rental vs owned ho

The point is that if you do do it, it's on you to understand the limitations of using someone else property. Just like the difference between rental vs owned housing. There are also fairly obvious differences between work-issued computers and all of your other analogies: 1. A car (and presumably the cyberpunk android body) is much more expensive than a computer, so the downside of owning both a personal and a work one is much higher. 2. A chair or a wheel chair doesn't need security monitoring because it's a chair (I guess you could come up with an incredibly convoluted scenario where it would make sense to put GPS tracking in a wheelchair, but come on). > just buys the person the chair. And then it's the employee's chair. It's not because there's a law against loaning chairs, it's because the chair is likely customized for a specific person and can't be reused. Or if you're talking about WFH scenarios, they just don't want to bother with return shipping.

derefr 2y ago
No, it's the difference between owned housing vs renting from a landlord who is also your boss in a company town, where the landlord has a vested interest in e.g. preventing you from using your apartment to also do work for a competitor. Which is, again, a situation so shitty that we've outlawed it entirely! And then also imposed further regulations on regular, non-employer landlords, about what kinds of conditions they can impose on tenants. (E.g. in most jurisdictions, your landlord can't restrict you from having guests stay the night in your room.) Tenants' rights are actually a great analogy for what I'm talking about here. A company-issued laptop is very much like an apartment, in that you're "living in it" (literally and figuratively, respectively), and that you therefore should deserve certain rights to autonomous possession/use, privacy, freedom from restriction/compromise in use, etc. While you don't literally own an apartment you're renting, the law tries to, as much as possible, give tenants the rights of someone who does own that property; and to restrict the set of legal justifications that a landlord can use to punish someone for exercising those (temporary) rights over their property. IMHO having the equivalent of "tenants' rights" for something like a laptop is silly, because that'd be a lot of additional legal edifice for not-much gain. But, unlike with real-estate rental, it'd actually be quite practical to just make the "tenancy" case of company IT equipment use impossible/illegal — forcing employers to do something else instead — something that doesn't force employees into the sort of legal area that would make "tenants' rights" considerations applicable in the first place.
- valicord 2y ago
  No, that would be more like sleeping at the office (purely because of employee preferences, not because the employer forces you to or anything like that) and complaining about security cameras.

derefr 2y ago

No, it's the difference between owned housing vs renting from a landlord who is also your boss in a company town, where the landlord has a vested interest in e.g. preventing you from using your apartment to also do work for a competitor. Which is, again, a situation so shitty that we've outlawed it entirely! And then also imposed further regulations on regular, non-employer landlords, about what kinds of conditions they can impose on tenants. (E.g. in most jurisdictions, your landlord can't restrict you from having guests stay the night in your room.) Tenants' rights are actually a great analogy for what I'm talking about here. A company-issued laptop is very much like an apartment, in that you're "living in it" (literally and figuratively, respectively), and that you therefore should deserve certain rights to autonomous possession/use, privacy, freedom from restriction/compromise in use, etc. While you don't literally own an apartment you're renting, the law tries to, as much as possible, give tenants the rights of someone who does own that property; and to restrict the set of legal justifications that a landlord can use to punish someone for exercising those (temporary) rights over their property. IMHO having the equivalent of "tenants' rights" for something like a laptop is silly, because that'd be a lot of additional legal edifice for not-much gain. But, unlike with real-estate rental, it'd actually be quite practical to just make the "tenancy" case of company IT equipment use impossible/illegal — forcing employers to do something else instead — something that doesn't force employees into the sort of legal area that would make "tenants' rights" considerations applicable in the first place.

valicord 2y ago
No, that would be more like sleeping at the office (purely because of employee preferences, not because the employer forces you to or anything like that) and complaining about security cameras.