The OP was about a contractor though. The way I think about somebody who is truly a contractor is that they are their own IT department, and their capabilities in the IT space should be at least on par with whatever the client's IT department enforces for in-house employees.
The above two comments however seem to be arguing from the viewpoint "this is just an individual person and any individual person surely needs babysitting by a big mighty corporate IT department because otherwise they can be expected to do stupid things like losing storage media with important data and not having backups, never doing updates, having their computers full of spyware, intermingling private stuff and work stuff from different clients in such a way that there's data leakage, etc. etc."
If you want to truly treat a contractor as a contractor, you should think about it as your IT needing to interface with their IT in such a way that it makes sense for both parties. And "here, use this laptop" is just frequently a bad solution from the point of view of the contractor's IT.
I also heavily object to the notion that any expectation of privacy goes away on a company laptop.
The above two comments however seem to be arguing from the viewpoint "this is just an individual person and any individual person surely needs babysitting by a big mighty corporate IT department because otherwise they can be expected to do stupid things like losing storage media with important data and not having backups, never doing updates, having their computers full of spyware, intermingling private stuff and work stuff from different clients in such a way that there's data leakage, etc. etc."
If you want to truly treat a contractor as a contractor, you should think about it as your IT needing to interface with their IT in such a way that it makes sense for both parties. And "here, use this laptop" is just frequently a bad solution from the point of view of the contractor's IT.
I also heavily object to the notion that any expectation of privacy goes away on a company laptop.