Putting everything in the cloud would be the next logical step in preventing all of the thiefs, er, employees from being able to remove data from the building. Now, just to convince all of the clients that their data is actually safer in the cloud than on-prem.
I've never heard of anyone making a 'fairness' argument about sending out laptops, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere has made it.
On my work machine (a normal Windows 10 laptop), the company has complete control over what gets installed. If I install something the company has forbidden, they notice, forcibly remove the software remotely, and then send someone to scold me.
It’s the only time in my career I’ve literally been yelled at. Somehow avoided getting fired. To make it worse they were doing red team pentesting that day so I totally looked like I was hacking the Gibson.
This is rent seeking dressed up in security paranoia.
It'll still be hard to exfiltrate much that way, unless you record it as video and pack the data as pixels in an animation.
You can pass a couple tens of millions of bits through an LCD screen and a camera, a lot more via MITM on HDMI.
this has nothing to do with hardware, in fact that’s the point. this little cube is useless outside of a single use case. go ahead and take it, it’s just hardware, and will likely be no more than that once stolen.