> there's nothing wrong with corporations tracking use of their hardware.

As written, that means they can secretly turn on the camera and microphone to surveil my house, supposedly to check the usage on the hardware.

Surely that's very "wrong", if not also illegal in most places.

That's clearly not what was meant

No, read what they're replying-to.

I wrote one sentence about how "there are ways for companies to go too far", which I think is pretty dang uncontroversial and trivially-true. However that user replied with what is clearly a disagreement, with corporate justifications and placing sole responsibility on employees to avoid the hardware.

This leads to two competing options:

(A) They simply can't imagine any scenario where a company might "go too far" and be at fault.

(B) Their stance is much milder, but for some reason they are replying to a straw-man argument that isn't what I actually wrote.

Of those two ambiguities, I went with (A), but if you think (B) is a more-charitable reading...

Or that the discussion was about information on and being transmitted through the devices and I was limiting my opinion on "there being nothing wrong with corporations tracking use of their hardware" to that scope, and not extending it to include spying on people in their homes using the device peripherals.

No, they shouldn't be flicking on your laptop camera or mic remotely, as these are pretty obviously violations of your privacy.

My rights are not subordinate to my company's, if anything it should be the reverse. My employment contract is intended for mutual benefit and the company also reserves the right to privacy from me in some things, even things in the scope of my employment. It should be acceptable to do things outside the scope of your employment using corporate devices, and you should retain a reasonable expectation of privacy when doing so.

There are some places where I don't really have an opinion; if you work in, I dunno, pet grooming, and you and your employer agree to... "shared custody" of a device then sure. But I'm not sure that's possible in some fields. As I understand it, financial companies are legally mandated to record every single message sent/received on the machine so they can prove that nobody's doing insider trading or whatever. I would kind of expect something similar for medical field companies. I'm open to suggestions, but I can't personally see a way to uphold that obligation while giving the employees privacy if they want to use the company device to ex. check their personal email.