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.

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.