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The author didn't define what owning means, but my guess is that, the computer must not run code without his approval, and must be able to run any code he wants.

Nowadays, you can only truly own an emulator.

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Yeah my guess is that OP is on Windows, judging by the way they mention advertising. This is the way I used to think and now that I am solely on macOS and Linux for my personal computing tasks, I don’t feel like that any more, though I am not foolish enough to believe that even on those systems you can’t be spied on at a hardware or OS level. Even if you’re on a theoretically 100% secure OS, any third-party software such as, oh, a browser, could be phoning home or have analytics hooks that track all kinds of things. If you’re super paranoid, I suppose you could always install Kali Linux on a VM and run TOR on that for covert communications. Or use smoke signals and manual OTPs.

> Yeah my guess is that OP is on Windows, judging by the way they mention advertising. This is the way I used to think and now that I am solely on macOS and Linux for my personal computing tasks, I don’t feel like that any more,

I don't think either are immune from the problem. Even Ubuntu was sending people's local disk searches to their servers so that they could push amazon ads. Everything I've ever touched from Apple seemed to push you to their own apps/ecosystem. If you want to put music on your iphone, you can't just plug it in and open it like a drive, they'll push you to itunes. They also seem to very heavily push their cloud stuff.

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